Abandon Your Guilt and Shame
First of all, know that a bankruptcy proceeding merely prohibits creditors from enforcing certain debt. After the case is administered, you may pay anyone you like. So, if it really matters to you personally that you pay all that you owe, you can still go ahead and use the protection of bankruptcy law, then afterward pay all your creditors.
If you are struggling to pay debts and feel as if, despite your best efforts, you continue to fall behind, you are not alone. This is an unfortunately commonplace way of life today.
There was once a time in this country, or so I’m told, where it was possible to raise a family on the modest income of one wage earner. Houses cost approximately a years’ salary or less. Honest working people had money in their pockets, with which they could choose to spend, save or invest. A household did not require two adults to work 60 hours each in order to make minimum payments on debt. Usurious interest was considered immoral, not just unlawful.
Do I have to tell you that all this has changed? Yet from this seemingly idyllic period came certain ideas about borrowing and repaying debt that persist today, despite our economy having been turned unfortunately inside-out.
When the nation’s economy provided ordinary working people the resources to maintain an American standard of living without borrowing, no wonder borrowing came to be perceived as unnecessary, indulgent or weak. And where ordinary people needed only to work and earn a wage in order to stay ahead, then shame on anyone who thought of short-changing their creditors!
Today, financial institutions and other speculators have succeeded in putting a strangle-hold on the American public. A home in a neighborhood near work costs three years’ salary or more, and whether you rent or buy, your monthly housing costs amount to at best a third, maybe even half or more of your take-home pay. Most families rely on two incomes and still stay only a pay check or two away from default and ensuing disaster. It is still possible to save, but the obstacles have increased in magnitude and in tandem with the enormously profitable business of lending money to ordinary people.
Typically, your creditors are not your friends and neighbors, but institutions with one solitary, all consuming goal: to obligate you to pay as much as the law will allow or more if they can get away with it and to take from you all that you have, by force if necessary. Their playing field is free of unbusiness-like concerns, like what is morally right or in your best interest. Credit card issuers charge 30% interest for one reason alone: because they can. In a word, the practices of the lending institutions of this country are shameless.
When you tell a friend or neighbor you’ll pay them back, you know that your friend may not have the means to enforce your promise. Your friend does not have a collection agency, law firms and Congress on his side to maximize his advantage. You’re it, the last line of defense. But your friend would probably understand a late payment if you were sick or lost your job or had to pay someone else first for essential things.
When you signed on with present day lenders, you understood that the lender had tremendous resources to enforce the debt to the fullest extent the law would allow. You understood and agreed that, no matter how your health or financial situation changed, if you failed for an instant, the lender would unleash its arsenal of collection measures.
Do you see the difference? If you still want to pay all your debts to the penny as a matter of personal pride, that’s perfectly understandable. A bankruptcy proceeding will not prevent that. But if you cannot presently do it and instead decide to use bankruptcy protection, you remain within the same moral bounds as your creditors: the full extent of the law! Later, once your finances stabilize, you retain the right to pay anyone you choose.
Menacing financial hardship typically results from ordinary circumstances and through no fault of the debtor’s own. We are most fortunate to live in a country with laws that provide relief and a fresh financial start to the honest debtor, especially so when the financial environment has become so reckless and unscrupulous.
Whether you are unemployed, retired or working, and no matter how you have come to financial difficulty, you owe it to yourself, your family and the future of each of you to get the fresh start in life that Congress has intended by enacting bankruptcy law. So shed your antiquated notions that derive from a way of life that we do not have! You don’t owe anybody anything but what the law requires, and Congress has provided you with law that enables you to adjust what you owe, when appropriate.