I wish I found this sooner!

Hello, I am new and would like to say how grateful I am for finding this forum. I have been coming here every day since June and just decided to register, because I'm very apprehensive about sharing our story and I normally don't participate in online forums.

We are about 76k in cc debt with about 15 accounts, accumulating for many years. My husband worked at a terrible job with a low salary. His employer constantly made promises (raises, commissions, etc.) and never kept them. But my husband stayed because he was afraid of not being able to find another job. We lived paycheck to paycheck and began to charge for necessities like oil and groceries. A couple of years ago, he got a much better paying job, but were still trying to catch up and got new bills! Oil prices skyrocketed, and we charged the bills to be able to get new deliveries to heat our home. We tried to use of 0 percent balance transfers.

The new company stopped issuing corporate cc's, & my husband had to make some very expensive equipment purchases on our personal card, which went over limit by several thousand. This snowballed with over the limit fees, late fees (waiting to be reimbursed by employer) PLUS they rate jacked us on all cards to 29.99. Needless to say, when we were reimbursed it didn't cover everything. We used tax returns and 401k to make the astronomical minimums and were told that 6 consecutive ontime payments would reduce our APR (it didn't). So then we went back to charging groceries, etc. so we could use all our cash to pay cc's. I got a new job, but it still didn't help.

After 3 years of this, we just couldn't keep up with them anymore. I prayed to St. Jude, and almost immediately found this site (Thank you, St. Jude!!!).

We decided to settle ourselves and stopped paying some in June and some in July. We have cc's with BOA (our largest), Chase, Discover and Citi. I really want to order the package from zipdebt, but I have to wait to afford it. The phone rings constantly, and it's an emotional roller coaster. We talked to all of them but I don't see the need to talk to all of them, every single day. Chase & Disc are offering hardship programs, but we need to save up a little first. Chase wants to verify our income, etc. My husband is expecting a nice bonus around Christmas, (and I want to use that for BOA). I'm not interested in a settlement company, and as someone else said, BK is a permanent solution for a temporary problem. I just hope we're strong enough to endure this, and we're going to keep praying...