We had everything in the beginning and we had worked hard for it. We bought a business that we hoped would become our main source of income and were trying to buy another business when our my husbands company announced they were moving across the country. Within 3 days we had sold off the parts of the business we could, and shut down. The only outstanding debt for the business was the rental contract for the space, and a couple of personal credit cards I had used for advertising fees. Luckily I had been smart enough to negotiate taking over the lease of the prior business owner so there was only $17,000 left on the lease rather than $120,000 that would have been there had we signed a 5 year lease. Of course, we still had to decide what to do about the $17,000. While filing bankruptcy loomed in the back of our minds, I wanted to put it off as long as possible, so we waited to see what would happen.

It took 9 months for my husband to find a job. This was almost 4 years ago, before the recession began, before the unemployment rates started to skyrocket, and before everyone starting losing their homes to foreclosure and running to the nearest court to file their bankruptcy papers. During this time the rental company got a judgment against me for the debt, but there was nothing they could do to collect it because I don’t own anything other than our house which already has a mortgage on it, and my car which isn’t worth nearly what I owed them.

Every day seemed to be getting better, we kept our heads above water catching up on my husbands bills that piled up while he was on unemployment. You see he also has children that we had been fighting to get custody of for 3 years. He had a large child support obligation, so large that he only had $200 left of his unemployment after paying child support each month. Right before he lost his job we finally won 50/50 custody, but we had to move to their home state in order to take custody. With my children in another state, the only way we could do this, was to get a second home, and pray he found a job that would let him telecommute between the two states. This is exactly what happened, of course our expenses doubled.

Everything worked out for almost 2 years until the company laid off 50% of it’s workers. So now we were left with 2 houses, we were still paying child support even though we had the kids 50% of the time (welcome to family court Dad!), and we had to do it on basically one income. We still didn’t want to file bankruptcy, so we tried everything we could.

Continued in Part 2 – Loan Modification
Part 3 – Foreclosure
Part 4 – Judgment