More bankruptcy talk

Our bankruptcy hearing is in a a couple weeks, we have to go downtown and a trustee will look over our documents in an attempt to find assets to liquidate for our creditors that aren't protected by Oregon law, which is actually pretty generous about what they will protect. Our lawyer anticipates no real problems so we should be good after that.

He filed the paperwork a couple weeks ago and since then we have had at minimum one credit card or auto loan offer per day come in the mail, they take many forms, hand addressed letters are common, but an attempt at making it look legal, like from the IRS also is up there, there are also the traditional easily identified spam mail, if they all delivered on their promises, and I took them all up on it, I could have like a dozen cars now and an equal amount of credit cards, I assume with terrible interest rates and fees like you wouldn't believe, but I could have them.
It appears that bankruptcy does very little to discourage companies from offering you credit.

I feel better and better about the whole process as we go through it, more and more I am realizing that Donal Trump is right, and that is probably the only time you'll hear me say that, when he responds to attacks that talk about him declaring bankruptcy five times or whatever it is, he says that he used a tool that was available, and that there is nothing wrong with that.

Now on could argue, rightly, that bankruptcy for corporations is a very different animal than personal stuff, but the truth is if it is good enough for them, then it should be good enough for me as well. Entrepreneurs drive the middle class, and small businesses are still among the most important parts of our economy, and without the safety net of bankruptcy, people would be a lot less likely to take risks like starting a business because they would know they would have any debt they ended up with over their head for their entire lives if it failed.

I have felt like a failure for how my business ended, and that feeling will probably never go away entirely, I have done very real damage to mine and Zena's finances, and set back our financial independence by years, but as we go through this process, I am feeling better, I am realizing that we can recover and that all it will really take is time, and not even as much of that as you'd think!

This isn't to say our debt and credit system is not royally fucked in many ways, including and especially in the student loans arena, because it is, industry practices are amazingly predatory and while individual employees at banks may want to help you, they are more and more constrained by the rules set by the massive corporation that owns them, navigating that is tricky for people at our level of influence.

But I think it is worth it, I encourage anyone who does want to start a business to explore it, it costs very little to register a business name, and nothing at all to build a business plan and look around for financing, learn from my mistakes, don't start unless you can actually get decent finances and support, but it costs nothing to find out and unless you try you will never know.