Debt advice for someone abroad ..
Hopefully someone here can help me, without judgement, figure out how to approach the crappy situation we have found ourselves in.
My wife and I have roughly 35k in debt…
We have 20k in credit cards (which we haven’t made payments on in six months at least) and 15k in 2 personal loans that we have been keeping up on.
We moved to Costa Rica almost a year ago and unfortunately part of that move was massive pay cuts. Ideally we should’ve stayed a year longer and saved up and paid off debts, but we weren’t sure if my wife would’ve gotten the same job opportunity. Regardless We really didn’t want to live in America anymore and don’t plan on coming back.
Since being here we’ve had a couple surprises like the cost of living being much higher than expected, and we also had a situation (that we are still working on with a lawyer) where we got scammed out of 15k on a car purchase.. these hits as well as the lower pay has put us in a situation where we are trying to save as much as we can and that’s just not possible if we were to make all the payments on the cards and loans.
Some people have told me that with our cards at least we should just let go to collections and then eventually they will stop pursuing us… I have no idea how I feel about that.
I’m just rambling at this point but I guess I’m just looking for words of advice. Some stuff online says to intentionally let your debts go till they get closed out or charged off so you can pay for less than half of it or possible none at all. Some people have also suggested bankruptcy. I really don’t know what to do but maybe someone has some advice or tips for a general direction.