Restarting your Financial Life after Emerging from Bankruptcy.

Finally, the day has come! Receiving the notice of discharge, successfully completing bankruptcy, will feel like a big weight has been lifted off your shoulders. We know that getting to this point has been dreadfully long and exhaustingly difficult. What now?

Celebrate, enjoy the moment, you deserve it!

After you are all partied out, it’s time to settle down and prepare for your next big steps forward. Expect new challenges to arise that will test your tenacity, but just remember you powered through this far, and you can definitely survive whatever else life has in store in front of you. After all, the road to financial independence is a marathon, not a sprint. From this day on, focus your attention on a life of personal growth, happiness, and financial freedom.

You have crawled your way out of the swampy, muddy waters of bankruptcy, and are now determined to never endure those types of heartaches again. Your personal drive moving forward must center on becoming your own person, striving to project the best of you. Free from the shady debt collector’s phone calls at all hours of the day and night. Free from suspicious mail delivered to your home from sleazy lawyers and unscrupulous organizations with government agency sounding names, lying to you about how they can quickly fix all your financial headaches. Free from the stress that comes (again and again) every time you log-in to your bank account to review your declining funds. Free from wage garnishments for the unforgivable indebtedness position you have spiraled deep into.

Breath, it will be okay, you now know better and will work hard to take control of your own destiny. By exiting bankruptcy, you are reborn again, like an Olympian athletic candidate hungry to win, hungry for gold, hungry for personal success (as you see fit). The path to personal financial freedom will lead to your own gold medal. Focus on the day to day challenges, but set a plan to achieve your goals for not just tomorrow, but the day after that and the day after that one. It will not be easy, nothing you have done since making the brave and unpopular decision to choose bankruptcy, leaving behind a mainstream, but unsustainable lifestyle.

Let’s be blunt and honest to ourselves, shit is hard in these streets without credit, without a financially worthy score, without the plastic cards that buy happiness (really?) for so many, us previously included. Those “throw it in the bag” moments are gone, and with it our financial virginity (yeah I said it). Those bubbly and naive forever 21 years are gone for good and trust me, trust yourself, we will be better going forward.

Data source: ABI & Epiq Systems

We are not alone in this “after bankruptcy” world, since 2006, 11.6 million Americans have filed for bankruptcy. Plus, a record 2+ million filings right before the enactment of the 2005 Bankruptcy Law. Many didn’t learn the lesson the first time around, continuing to make similar mistakes that keep them in the downward spiral, the financial black hole that sucks up our souls, and enslaves many under corporate domains. Not us, we now know better, we will not be fooled again, we will strive for our own version of the American (_insert any nation here) Dream.  We will write our own stories, free from the clutches of corporations that see us as profit centers or just numbers in their Form 10-K annual reports.

Remember this, we are winners, and we will no longer accept losing in a “world of debt”. Together, from this day forward, we will push ourselves to do better, to become wiser, to tirelessly hustle to WIN OVER DEBT.