If your credit is bad, filing bankruptcy is the first step in recovering. Remember, you can recover quickly, relatively quickly, from a Chapter 7, takes about three years. From a Chapter 13, it will take longer to recover. That recovery process won’t start until after the Chapter 13 is complete, and that’s from three to five years. So, if your credit is bad, bankruptcy is the first step to recovery.
If your credit is good, occasionally I have people come into my office and they’ve never missed a payment, you know, they’ve got $70,000 of credit card debt, they’ve got a house payment, they’ve got a car payment and they’ve managed to make all of those payments, and they have a 700 credit score, and they say, well, if I file bankruptcy, what’s going to happen? Well, your credit will be destroyed. It’ll drop down a few hundred points and then you’ll have to start to rebuild.
But the other thing to keep in mind is on my website, the site that you’re on now, there are several videos made by a credit repair expert, his name is Patrick Richey, and he answers lots and lots of questions about credit, how it relates to bankruptcy, how to repair your credit. He speaks all over the country, teaches at universities, counsels banks on how to deal with credit. He’s also written a book called The Credit Roadmap. If you call my office or come to my office, I will give you that book free of charge. All of your questions about credit, credit repair, how it relates in terms of bankruptcy will be answered in that book. And I invite you to view the videos on this website and you’ll get a lot of information on that topic.
