“Jackie couldn’t stand it. Her nine and ten year olds were always begging her to play Monopoly with them. “It was easy enough to come up with excuses they could accept, like “I’m too busy right now” or “If I don’t cook dinner, nobody gets to eat around here,” she says. The truth of the matter was far more complex.

“How on earth could I put on a good face playing a game that constantly demanded I either pay bills or go to jail?” Jackie says. “It was just way too close to my reality to be something I sat down and did with my kids.” Jackie shuddered whenever she walked past the children’s game table and saw the white backs of property title cards screaming the word “Mortgage” in bold black letters up at her. To be sure, Jackie and her husband, Jim, were struggling to survive with a small business that wasn’t meeting their family’s financial needs. Both of them were working 18 hour days, trying to push the business to get a little traction. They were hanging on, hope against hope, and increasingly having to resort to credit cards for everything from kids’ school shoes to groceries.

By the time the business was finally shuttered and the husband and wife team had returned to the employment pool, their debt accumulation promised to keep them always at an impasse, always struggling to make minimum payments. “My biggest fear was having to tell the kids that we were going to lose our home”, Jackie confesses.

The delicate thread of maintaining minimum payments on maxed out revolving credit was broken the night Jim fell at work on his shift and ended up in the hospital for several days with a head injury. Jackie winces when she recalls the arrival of the first hospital bill in the mail. They hadn’t been able to afford medical insurance for quite some time.

Both Jackie and Jim are educated and experienced people. Jackie has a business degree and Jim worked in a generational family owned business for several years after graduating from college. They both were aware that the entrepreneurial life was loaded with risk but it was a road they were willing to take and sacrifice for. But in the end, energy, great ideas and immeasurable hard work were not enough to carry the day. Too little capitalization and too many circumstances outside of their control closed in on them. And still despite all, the dreaded word “bankruptcy” was avoided at all costs.

It wasn’t until Jackie awoke to the fact that she and her husband were breaking under the burden and slipping into incapacitating depression, that she decided it was time to take a look at a previously unconsidered route. For her children’s sake, she knew she needed to take charge. “You are willing to do things for your children that you never before thought possible,” Jackie explains. She went hunting for a reliable bankruptcy lawyer even though at first it went against every fiber in her being.

“During my first meeting with the attorney, I kept apologizing for our pathetic financial statement. With my business background, I already had it all lying out there as plain as day on a spreadsheet for him. I kept going back and forth between the spreadsheet and the Kleenex. My attorney simply handed me the tissue box and let me spill my guts. Then he said the magic words: “There is light at the end of the tunnel.”

Jackie and Jim went over all their options from creditor negotiation to bankruptcy filing with their attorney before determining that Chapter 7 was the most healthy option in their case. Jim admitted that this was still the hardest thing he had yet done in his life. “Your self image is severely dented in this process. But when you measure that against no longer being able to function as a provider for your family or as a parent to your children, the choice becomes clear.” When regarded as a last resource safety valve to keep stressed families from falling apart, bankruptcy law is properly used for its original intent.

Jackie will tell you that both she and Jim have been hurt by the whole experience but she also notes that they are able to get a little sleep now. “It was the struggle leading up to the filing, not the filing itself, that was the nightmare,” she explains. Their attorney has also made it possible for them to not lose their modest home in the process. “We have a lot of hard work ahead of us in the future to make up for that dark period,” Jackie says, smiling faintly. “But at least our kids have been spared losing their home, or worse yet, their family.