Under bankruptcy, you don’t necessarily get everything wiped clean and a fresh start. A court will determine how much you can pay and to whom and assets will in

Under bankruptcy, you don’t necessarily get everything wiped clean and a fresh start. A court will determine how much you can pay and to whom and assets will include a percentage of your future income. On top of that, your ability to get credit will be severely impacted for at least seven years meaning good luck getting a car loan at non-usurious rates, credit cards, etc. You may even find that getting something like a simple checking account becomes rather difficult (I had to sell my first house in a short sale in the 90s and even though the consequences were less dramatic than bankruptcy,¹ it still impacted my financial prospects for a long time afterwards). ⸻ 1. I went to a credit counseling agency in the midst of that financial distress and the counselors all insisted that I didn’t want to go through bankruptcy although in retrospect, that was exactly what I should have done. What I didn’t know then was that the credit counseling agencies are all run by the credit card companies.