unemployment.."benefits" and the art of not owning anything.

Getting a default judgment is never a good thing. Judgments generally have a SOL of 20 years and can be renewed indefinitely. If they were to obtain a writ of execution they could take your Toyota. It may have some kind of exemption for seizure of property depending on what state you live in, but if you don't object to it as being exempt then they certainly could.

That could be very bad advice depending on your debts. I am not a lawyer but I see no reason to not respond to a summons. You could greatly reduce what they get a judgment for and maybe completely eliminate what you owe. I would also not file bankruptcy unless I owed over 100k in unsecured debt but you would need to base that amount of your debt to potential income.

Do you plan on being unemployed forever? Answer the summons and fight it. YOu might not have a job now but with 20 years to accrue interest, eventually a judgement creditor will find something to take from you.

This is the the worst advise anyone could give you. You ALWAYS answer the summons or you end up with a default judgment. Fight it, dispute it.....but never ever ignore it.

Filing bankruptcy. Everyone is different so I dont know where you came up with a $100K bottom line. In this day and age, bankruptcy is a fact of life and is not a tragedy. The long term affects are actually less than if you dont file. I filed 6 years ago on $60k...combination of my husband loosing his job post 9/11 and a brain anurysm for me. We didnt want to loose our home so I filed. We refinance our home 2 years later at 2% less than what we were paying (5.25%). Within 3 years had credit cards with 0% interest for the 6 months with 9% rate after that. Yup, the bk is still on my credit but it does not and really has not affected my ability to get credit at all. Do I feel bad about my bk? Not at all. We tried working with our creditors but we got rate jacked. They refused to give us time to recover....we only needed a year and would have been back on track. We had no other option...loosing our home was not an option as our mortgage was lower than renting.

I advise on several boards and quite frankly I have never seen so many negative attitudes towards BK as on this board. BK is a fresh start and no longer holds the stigma it used to. It is not the end of the world....in fact for most it is the start of a new life!!

I just pulled the 100k number out of a hat based on my debt and income. That is why I qualified my statment by saying that a person would need to analyze the amount of debt to their potential income. For example, if a persons annual income is 200k a year then they really should not be filing for BK on 100k but if their annual income is 20k a year then it certainly should be considered.

I am one of those that always advises looking at all the options prior to filing BK. I generally lean to not filing unless a person is seeing a lot of judgments and creditors are threatening to levy accounts, place leins and garnish wages. I would file immediately if I risked losing my home. I think some people jump the gun though by filing before any of that has happend.