Bankruptcy: A Family Safety Valve
"Mom, can't you play Monopoly with us for an hour?" This was the children's daily pleading. Jackie knew her son and daughter, nine and ten years old, couldn't begin to understand what their mother's dislike of the game was all about so she just kept handing them excuses like having to get the laundry done and so on. In fact, she was trying to shield them from what lay behind her violent distaste of that age old board game.
Watching her two elementary school aged children flip over a property title card and mortgage themselves to the hilt in order to stay in the game was more than Jackie could bear to be around. She was terrified her golden haired children would grow up to deal with crippling debt, an overload of which she and her husband, Jim, were straining under. Their recently launched retail business was not paying the bills while requiring one hundred percent of each partner's time. The slippery slope of putting the kids' school shoes and grocery purchases on plastic began, always with the thought that next month things would start improving.
When the business finally did die its bitter death and the couple had returned to working for other companies, their debt burden was enormous. It would be all they could do to tread water for years to come. Jackie was kept awake at night with a recurring dread: "My biggest fear was having to tell the kids that they were going to lose their home."
Then what seemed like the worst possible scenario turned just a little bit darker. Jim slipped and fell while at his night job and landed in the hospital for several days with a head injury. A couple of weeks later the uninsured medical bills started pouring in. Jackie shakes her head while saying "Like a morality play, our lives are the ones people point to and say to their children, "Beware."
When Jackie and Jim decided to take the risk of running their own business, they had most everything running in their favor. A smart couple, energetic and educated (Jackie has a business degree and Jim had past experience from being in business with his father), flowing with great ideas and entrepreneurial can-do, they thought they could make it over the initial start-up hump. But like all business owners, they were operating in a world where many circumstances were out of their control. Nevertheless, when they discovered that they were too undercapitalized, the word "bankruptcy" remained taboo.
Slowly the cracks revealed themselves and Jackie recognized that both she and Jim were slipping into depression and dysfunction that would soon not permit them to properly look after their two most precious assets, their two young children. "You are willing to do things for your children that you never before thought possible," Jackie explains. After weeks of internal wrangling, she went online and found a well recommended bankruptcy attorney.
Prepared with a scrupulously detailed financial statement, Jackie went into her first meeting with the attorney. What she was unprepared for was the torrent of emotion that came tumbling out when she relayed her saga to him. The numbness of past months were transformed in those few minutes. "I stupidly apologized to him (the attorney) over and over again for our situation, as though I believed it was a deliberate act of folly on our part - like we should have seen it coming down the pike. Then I apologized for dumping on him like he was my therapist or something." As for therapy, the attorney did hand her a tissue box before saying, "There is light at the end of the tunnel."
Jackie and Jim explored all their options with their bankruptcy attorney and after weighing them, decided that filing for Chapter 7 was the one most appropriate for their case. "It's not like you are going to come out of this smelling like a rose," Jim admits. "Your pride, your idea of who you are is severely dented. But when you measure that against no longer being able to function as a provider for your family or as a parent to your children, it becomes clear that the filing process was meant to give me a new lease on life. It is a safety valve that has kept my family from imploding."
The bankruptcy process has not been painless for this family, but at least they are able to get a little sleep at night with some of the emotional and financial adjustments now in place. Jackie and Jim are thankful that their attorney was able to save their small house in the process, something to be relieved about for their children's sake. "Yes, there is hurt. But it was the experience leading up to the filing, not the filing itself that was the nightmare," Jackie says. "There is no shortage of hard work ahead of us in terms of making up for that dark period but we are surviving. I am not sure how the saying 'Every cloud has a silver lining' can possibly apply here, but at least now we can focus on a healthier future.