We tried just about everything that we could think of to avoid it, we went to several credit counseling services to try and fix our credit before it was too late, but unfortunately, despite our best efforts, my wife and I still ended up bankrupt.  We had the same excuses that everyone else does: a lay off, medical bills and high interest rate credit cards drove us so deep into a whole that we couldn’t get out.  I used to think that filing for bankruptcy was a cop-out, that if you tried and fought hard enough that you could somehow figure out a way to make ends meet without having to resort to anything as drastic as filing, but that isn’t necessarily true.  Our credit cards were maxed out, which had pushed our credit score  way down, rendering us ineligible to receive a loan of any kind to consolidate our bills.  We were at a point where we just had to choose between the lesser of two evils – we either destroyed our credit score even further by simply not paying our bills or we destroyed it even further by filing for bankruptcy and having the debt discharged.  It was a pretty tough call, one that we didn’t want to have to make but we opted to file for Chapter 13.