My husband lost his job last December. He found a job 500 miles away in his hometown where it is cheaper to live than PA, but its only 1/2 of what he used to make. We put our home on the market so we could move there but have not been able to sell it (about 1 yr now). We never thought it would take this long. I took a job also, but both incomes are not enough to support our family of 4 in this house with our debt hanging over our heads. Credit cards have piled up and due to a few late payments (a day or two late at the most), interest rates are now high and accumulating huge amounts, making it impossible to stay on top of them all. We have drained our savings and our money markets to keep everything going but are now unable to keep up. Can we claim Bankruptcy on our credit card debt or will we lose our property? With the price we have it at now, we are losing about $60K that we put down on it and fixed it up with, and will not even walk away with enough to move us once we pay a realtor. We are in PA. If we could get out from under the credit cards, we could hang on to the property until it sells with both of us working. Our plan was to sell the house, use equity to pay down debt and move to his family property and live cheaper and pay things off, but it just didn't work out as planned and we are now really under diress trying to cope with this. Until this month, we have not had any super-late payments (our credit report shows not late payments) . My husbands father deeded him a piece of land from his property so that we could live in a trailer there when we sold our house until we could get back on our feet. If we can just claim Bankruptcy on our unsecured dept, we hope we can continue with the sale of this house and property then move to that property but we are afraid that we will we lose that too. So my questions are:
1. Can we claim bankruptcy on just our credit cards or will we lose the house in PA?
2. How can we protect the property we were deeded in another state so once we do sell the house (even if it is a short-sale) we will have a place to live?
3. We are in our mid 40's and are worried that we will never be able to repair our credit enough to even purchase a double wide home to put on the family property. Will there be options for us to be able to do this at some point?
