"Bankruptcy Was the Right Decision for Us"
Life After Bankruptcy Stories
If you had asked me anytime before the accident if I would ever file bankruptcy, I would have said, “No way.”I thought bankruptcy was for deadbeats who spent too much on their credit cards. I figured that since we had a little money saved up, and were always very careful to pay our bills in full every month, that we would never be faced with that kind of decision.
My bankruptcy story started with a phone call. I was a stay-at-home mom, cleaning up after the kids’ lunch when the phone rang. My husband had been in a car accident, and was on his way to the hospital. I gathered up the children and rushed to the emergency room.
He would live, they told me, but there had been a lot of damage done to his legs, and he was going to need a few operations. The first one would stabilize the bones in his legs, and others would hopefully restore his ability to walk.
As you have probably guessed, we did not have health insurance. We had always made one excuse or another, or decided that we just didn’t have the money. If I could only do it again, I would have scraped up every penny to keep our family covered. But we hadn’t, and we were in trouble.
The bills started, and kept coming for months. I diligently paid what I could, because I was raised to pay what I owe.
But what we could pay wasn’t doing anything to bring down the balances, and the total finally grew to an amount I didn’t think we could save if we had our whole lives to do it. We were overwhelmed, wanting to make good but finding it an impossible task. It’s the hardest decision we’ve ever had to make, but bankruptcy was the right decision for us. It took away a burden we could never have handled on our own.
My husband has recovered better than the doctors expected, and we’re getting our lives back on track. None of this has been easy, but bankruptcy was our only reasonable choice and I don’t know where we’d be if we had decided otherwise.
Contributed Anonymously
