All my sins…
all your money are belong to us
Article by DebtKid
DebtKid has written 444 awesome articles. This is my online journal of my journey to get out of debt. I started with over 300K in debt and am slowly hacking away.
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Yikes .. that is a lot! Which I know you know but it was just my first thought. My second thought .. have you tried selling some things? I know it takes time to go through the process but Craigs List and eBay can be great resources for generating a little extra money. When you are looking for as much money as possible, it’s worth the effort! If I were you, I would just try and sell anything that you really don’t need.
Good luck with the process. Climbing out of this debt is going to be hard but so far it sounds like you are really putting in the effort and that will pay off. Keep it up!
Is your business incorporated or structured to be some sort of limited liability venture? Or are you a sole proprietor or in a classic partnership?
The reason why I ask is that if you have a corporate/limited liability form for your business, one strategy may be to have the business go bankrupt and work like heck to get down your personal debts and not have to declare personal BK. But if you didn’t incorporate or aren’t using some kind of limited liability company entity, that may not be an option for you…your father may be right that personal and business BK are the only way to go.
One site you need to check out is Bud Hibbs’s site…he has excellent advice for dealing with debt collectors. He can help you figure out which of them are scammers and which ones are not (yes you should expect scammers to be calling you soon and trying to collect on non-existant debts if they aren’t already)
Also get thee to the public library and look for books like Amy Daczyczyn’s The Complete Tightwad Gazette, Robert Manning’s Credit Card Nation and Jim Scurlock’s new book called Maxed Out (he’s done a documentary movie on the same topic that I’m looking forward to seeing). The first book has a *lot* of simple money saving tips while the second and third will get you thinking about credit card debt and how many people it is affecting (and maybe you’ll feel a lot less isolated after reading them). I would say buy them (preferably used or discounted copies from the cheapest online site you can find) if you were in better financial shape, but clearly you’re not so just check them out of the library for now and work on cutting expenses and saving money to pay the bills you currently have. If your closest library doesn’t have them, ask to get them delivered to your library through something called interlibrary loan.
Another inspiring book for you (for the future) might be Dominguez and Robin’s Your Money Or Your Life so you can chart out a financial plan for the future that can show you how to live more simply and frugally in the future.
Another thing you can be doing is searching on ‘frugality’ and/or ‘voluntary simplicity’ on the Web…you will get a lot of good useful ideas and food for thought (and maybe even for your spirit). I like simpleliving.net a lot and also dollarstretcher.com, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg.
Hang in there and keep posting when you can.
I can certainly understand how you feel about your
situation — not because I’m there too, but I’ve done
some day trading and didn’t make $$$, but the
few thousands I lost didn’t cause me problems as I
was able to cover that OK. But the trading feelings
and emotions are strong and can be addictive.
Outside of dealing with your debts with a lawyer
and acting prudent with anything you’re doing now,
my suggestion might be to see about writing a book, either
fact or fiction to make some $$$ without spending any
money, but your creative time to put your story into
words — could be a payoff. You might contact a
college to see if someone might take on the offer with
a $$$ percentage deal.
I’ll spend some more time to see if I can come up with
any other realistic suggestion.
God Bless you in your effort — hope you’re adding
prayer to your effort.