Consumer Credit Counseling Service (CCCS) is one of the few credit counseling services that can do your pre-bankruptcy certification. You must be beyond any ability to pay your debts off in 5 years, and they will certify you for Chapter 7. If you can pay your debts in 5 years, you can join their debt consolidation program or you can use your own plan, but they won’t issue you a certificate for bankruptcy. If you don’t qualify to file, you don’t file with the present law. I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

Once you file and have a case number with the court, you have to take a personal financial counseling course to help you avoid getting into the same mess again. I also don’t think this is a bad thing.

I’m glad to say that none of my debts came from buying new stuff just for the heck of it or going on vacations or any such frivolous spending. The money was used for setting up and running my now failed business. It paid for advertising (very expensive, yellow pages ads, newspaper, yard signs), required federal and state licensing, training and tests (big initial expense), subscriptions to required memberships (very expensive as well), office supplies, client supplies, etc. The only piece of equipment I bought using credit was a laptop computer in 2004, and I paid part cash and used a little credit. I also bought an all-in-one on sale and a used desk chair and a used filing/storage cabinet all with cash. It’s now 2008 and the computer is pretty worthless if anyone wanted to sell it. It runs fine for my purposes, but as far as having value, it doesn’t. It’s totally depreciated.

The biggest expenses were advertising and subscriptions. Most off-line advertising methods are quite expensive, but you have to do it especially as a start-up or you won’t even get off the ground. Had I known about pay-per-click back then I could have saved a whole lot of money and gotten a lot more bang for my buck. I should also have not taken out a yellow pages ad. A yellow pages listing was far cheaper, but my mentors said part of a good marketing strategy is to have at least a small YP ad. Putting the whole marketing package together; ads, press kits, business cards and stationary, professional photo, etc. wasn’t cheap.

In my previous business you had to be affiliated with some bigger name or you would never be noticed at all. That’s where subscribing to a program with a mentor comes in, and they charge a lot to be your mentor, train you in their business model and provide you with all their materials. After the initial investment and training, the annual subscription is pretty hefty.

Back then I wasn’t a blogger and didn’t even know about blogging. I paid a boat-load of money for my business website. Now I could set up that same site, make it more dynamic and pay 6 times less per year for it. I’m paying about 6 times less per year for all my websites combined, and I now have 11 domains. Hosting can be very inexpensive ($9.95/mo) and WordPress software (free, open-source) makes setting up a static site just as easy as setting up a blog. But I didn’t know that back then either.

This whole thing has been and continues to be a huge lesson.

But we are close to getting out of debt so that will never happen, now. But I’m not against using the system my taxes built the system. I was on welfare before I got my teaching degree and now I have been teaching 29 years. Go for it sweetie.

I have not read all your blogs but I’m not sure I understand why what DR says is so important to you. I love DR and have learned a lot from him. But if I was in your shoes I would not think twice about filing. Just my opinion.