[I:http://www.creditdad.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/MegBrown16.jpg]“”I was always torn when the kids begged me to play Monopoly”, Jackie H. owned during a recent conversation. “I desperately wanted to share in their fleeting childhood fun but I literally didn’t have the stomach for that particular game at that moment in my life.”
“How on earth could I put on a good face playing a game that constantly demanded I either pay bills or go to jail?” Jackie says. “It was just way too close to my reality to be something I sat down and did with my kids.” Jackie shuddered whenever she walked past the children’s game table and saw the white backs of property title cards screaming the word “Mortgage” in bold black letters up at her. To be sure, Jackie and her husband, Jim, were struggling to survive with a small business that wasn’t meeting their family’s financial needs. Both of them were working 18 hour days, trying to push the business to get a little traction. They were hanging on, hope against hope, and increasingly having to resort to credit cards for everything from kids’ school shoes to groceries.
When the business finally did die its bitter death and the couple had returned to working for other companies, their debt burden was enormous. It would be all they could do to tread water for years to come. Jackie was kept awake at night with a recurring dread: “My biggest fear was having to tell the kids that they were going to lose their home.”
The delicate thread of maintaining minimum payments on maxed out revolving credit was broken the night Jim fell at work on his shift and ended up in the hospital for several days with a head injury. Jackie winces when she recalls the arrival of the first hospital bill in the mail. They hadn’t been able to afford medical insurance for quite some time.
Jackie and Jim are not dumb people. Jackie with a business degree and Jim with his family history filled with self-employment, they both knew they were taking risks when starting their own business. They were brimming with energy and great ideas, a little low on capital but high on entrepreneurial spirit. They were convinced that combining these strengths with lots of hard work would bear fruit. They did what every whole-hearted entrepreneur does: They went for broke into a world where they could not possibly control all the circumstances. All the while the word “bankruptcy” remained so vile, neither of them ever breathed it.
Slowly the cracks revealed themselves and Jackie recognized that both she and Jim were slipping into depression and dysfunction that would soon not permit them to properly look after their two most precious assets, their two young children. “You are willing to do things for your children that you never before thought possible,” Jackie explains. After weeks of internal wrangling, she went online and found a well recommended bankruptcy attorney.
“I was a mess during my first meeting with the attorney. I couldn’t stop apologizing for our sorry situation, as though I still had some control over it. I couldn’t believe the flood of emotion I struggled with as we went over our family’s failed financial statement with this stranger.” Jackie went through more than a few tissues in the meeting but knew she had done the right thing when her attorney said, “There is light at the end of the tunnel.”
Jackie and Jim explored all their options with their bankruptcy attorney and after weighing them, decided that filing for Chapter 7 was the one most appropriate for their case. “It’s not like you are going to come out of this smelling like a rose,” Jim admits. “Your pride, your idea of who you are is severely dented. But when you measure that against no longer being able to function as a provider for your family or as a parent to your children, it becomes clear that the filing process was meant to give me a new lease on life. It is a safety valve that has kept my family from imploding.”
Jackie will tell you that both she and Jim have been hurt by the whole experience but she also notes that they are able to get a little sleep now. “It was the struggle leading up to the filing, not the filing itself, that was the nightmare,” she explains. Their attorney has also made it possible for them to not lose their modest home in the process. “We have a lot of hard work ahead of us in the future to make up for that dark period,” Jackie says, smiling faintly. “But at least our kids have been spared losing their home, or worse yet, their family.
