Sorry this is long, if you don't want to read about our experience oflosing everything due to job loss then just skip on to the next answer. I do go on and on about stuff sometime.
We did credit counseling and everything we could do to lower our debt.
Anyone who thinks deciding to file bankruptcy is cheating or lying just hasn't been in the position to have to consider it yet. We had a good life, 2 new cars, a nice house, several credit cards with not a lot on them, could go on fun vacations, we could eat steak every night if we wanted to and did when the missionaries from church would come eat with us, we weren't making tons of money but enough. He brought home about $1800 per month after the bills were taken out of his check through the credit union.
He out of a job out of the blue. It was retribution for a safety violation my hubby turned his engineer in on. The pilot plant needed to fix this issue but the engineer over it didn't want to stop production in the pilot plant and take time to fix it.
He fired hubby for insubordination. Hubby was union and had been employed by the company for 18+ years. The worst the engineer was supposed to be able to do was transfer him to another project. The union, my hubby, the engineer, and the powers that be, had 3 different meetings and the engineer was adamant and refused to budge, the company was in a quandary as to what to do, they could fire people for different reasons even if they were union. The union was up in arms about this particular issue though and were not going to allow it and were starting to toss out the idea of a strike if the company fired hubby. They felt even if he had been insubordinate his work record showed he was a good employee with not one single issue in the whole time he had been there.
Hubby decided to offer the alternative of him quitting, getting full, maximum unemployment, and money for retraining him for another job. So he walked away from his high paying job to get an associates degree, get $212 per week for the full 2 years uncontested in unemployment while he was going to school, was able to work at the local Vo-Tech teaching A+ certification classes but that pay came out of his unemployment check once he turned in his wages, etc.....
We lost my vehicle, his was paid for, we lost our home, his mom bought us the mobile home we still live in today, we lost our lifestyle, our credit, our everything.
We ended up having to go to the credit bureau's credit counselor for free and learned a lot about budgeting and trying to get the debts paid off but the man sat us down and told us some facts.
Once life changes like this it is not very often it ever goes back to the way it was. Jobs that pay high money aren't everywhere and they are seldom found again. It is almost always a huge pay cut once the person does find a job.
Once they go back to work the bill collectors will start trying to garnish wages and they don't have to ever stop calling, even if a payment is made, that just makes them realize you have money now and they want to call and bother you more so you'll pay off the bill faster. They can only take so much out of an already smaller paycheck.
It is a never ending scope of life that some people will never have to live through.
That said, we talked to the credit counselor about every option except filing bacnkruptcy. He did the program where they take our money and pay the bills for us, the companies usually go for this due to them being guaranteed some sort of payment each month. As I said we did only have a couple of credit cards with not a lot on them. The one was City Bank and it was several thousand dollars and then a Sears, Wards, Penney's, etc...the store ones had at most a few hundred.
The counselor took $1300 per month out of our take home pay. That left us with $500, at most, to pay for gasoline, car insurance, food, utilities, clothing, medications, co-pays at the docs office, every thing one could possible have that was not a loan type payment. We could not survive at all. We had to back out of the program. At that time he told us he had known going in that there was no way we would ever be debt free or even ever get the bills paid down due to our payments only partially covering the interest payments each month and the actual bills not being lowered at all.
We started paying a good attorney a bit of money each month and put up with the phone calls, the threats, all of it, and finally just disconnected the phone to stop the stress. It was hard living out in the country with no phone but we managed.
Our attorney kept all our bill correspondence and when hubby and him finally went to court it was all there and listed. I did not go to court with them but we did not lose anything from our home. We did not have excess artwork worth money, we did not have a lot of valuables in any way, he had sold off his 1800's gun collection and comic books months and months beforehand. We did not lose any possessions at all.
We survived and made it through. We have had a couple of credit cards since but decided we didn't really want the stress of something happening again.