Paying for College While in Bankruptcy

One of the most frustrating things I have encountered lately is the whole college education funding problem. For most people, this process seems easy. You fill out the FAFSA form, you apply for scholarships, and sometimes you get money to help pay for your kid's education.If you don't happen to qualify for any assistance, then you can apply for a loan, and bang, you are good to go. . . EXCEPT when you have me, or my husband for a parent, then things all of a sudden become complicated. We have completed the FAFSA, my daughter searched for appropriate scholarships she could apply for, and she has been accepted to the college of her choice. The only problem is that we can't afford it. My daughter has been rejected for all of the scholarships she applied for. As of yesterday, all hopes of winning even a little scholarship money are dashed; the last rejection letter came in yesterday's mail. My poor daughter, crestfallen! The problem for us is that we are not in a minority, my husband and I are still married, my husband and I both have jobs, and my daughter is "only" a B student. On the surface, that doesn't sound like a bad thing, and it also looks like we should be able to at least help our daughter apply for a loan, but things are not always the way they appear to be on the outside. If you were to look just beneath the fraying edges of our family life, you would see that we are sitting precariously on the very top of a dangerous cliff; one little thing could send us over the edge. Because my husband and I are in an active Chapter 13 bankruptcy, three quarters of what we earn is taken by the court appointed trustee to pay our debts. The other one quarter of the income is to go to pay for groceries, utilities and healthcare. We are not in a position to co-sign on a loan. The FAFSA forms do not reflect the "sins" of the parents. It only looks at how much a person earns, not at what, where or how much of it goes to other things. So, because of the financial ineptitude of my husband and I, my dear daughter(s) are suffering. They are the ones who will be shouldering the cost of something my husband and I should, at the very least, be assisting with. My daughters will be impacted by a mistake my husband made and my inability to see it and insist that it be remedied, for years to come.

If you are currently considering filing for bankruptcy, or are currently in Chapter 13 bankruptcy, and you have found my blog because you were looking for help paying for your child's education, I am sorry, I do not have any help to offer you. There does not seem to be any assistance anywhere. Our only hope is that our daughter will be able to get a high interest student loan with a deferred repayment plan. If that happens, then we might be able to help her in four years when we have paid back all our previous debt. If you are considering filing for bankruptcy, please do a lot of research and if possible, find another way to get out of debt. Bankruptcy is awful and should be an absolute last resort.

Low Down, Dirty, No-Good. . .

There are not really any words that are sufficient in describing what I think about AIG and what they did with $440,000 (that's almost half a million folks!)of our $85 billion given to them to bail them out of the crap hole they had dug, but I will give you a list of some words that might come close: disgusting, appalling, arrogant, selfish, stupid, ridiculous, criminal, disrespectful, irresponsible, unacceptable, sh*tty, shameful, unforgivable, disgraceful, insolent, contemptible, dishonorable, disheartening, offensive, felonious, malicious, wicked, malevolent, sinful, repulsive, outrageous, sickening. I am sure there are many other words that could be used to describe this criminal behavior by AIG. We should all be enraged by this and call for heads of the people involved with this. If any of the rest of us everyday, hardworking people did such a thing, we would be sitting in jail. What AIG did is the same thing as stealing, and there should be consequences for their stupidity. That's just my opinion!

Five Months on the Market--Still No Sale!

So, here we sit. Living in a house in Northern Virginia that cost us waaaaaaayyy more than the average home in the United States costs. At the same time, our house in Indiana is sitting empty with no buyer interested. The position we are in has to be the most stressful postion we have been in in the eighteen years of our marriage. It is getting to the point where it is going to break us financially if it doesn't sell by the end of the month. Our Century21 Realtor has been working hard to get people to look at the house, we have painted, cleaned, landscaped and dropped the price twice, and still no one has even come close to buying. The complaints about the house are things that we cannot do anything about. The neighbors behind the house have some cars that just sit there all year round. They are visible now because the trees that normally block that view have lost their leaves. Another complaint is the neighborhood size. That is weird. The neighborhood is large, but in a great school district and when we lived there people were close to each other and certain sections of the neighborhood would have block parties and would definitely help you out if you needed a helping hand. At any rate having a beautiful home (that I didn't want to leave in the first place) sitting empty makes me sick. My husband has a great job that pays well, but we are facing the real possiblity of him having to get a second job, and of me having to go back to work as well. It is a terribly frustrating situation and the media doesn't help at all. They keep reporting over and over again how bad the real estate industry is and how bad the economy is and how terrible the mortgage industry is. It all seems so hopeless and it is just about to break us financially.