What can they do?

What is the name of your state? Texas

My husband and I have 2 credit card accounts with Chase Bank totaling 34,000.00. Due to me being laid off and having trouble getting another job and his work (carpenter) being very slow the past 4-5 months, we are very deliquent.

What can Chase do if we are unable to pay?

Friends are telling us to walk away. Can we do that?

[Ladynred]

What can they do ?? They can sue you, and for 34K they are likely to do just that. After 6 months of non-payment, the accounts are charged-off. They will assign or sell them to collection agencies who will hound you. If Chase decides to sue (and there's no way to tell if they will, but they do sue), and they win, they get a judment against you. In TX they can't garnish wages, but they can sieze bank accounts and they can sieze any non-exempt property. TX has a 100% homestead exemption, but they could put a lien on the property (if you own a home). Its unlikely they could take any personal property unless it falls into the non-exempt category, so don't let Chase or any CA tell you they will garnish your wages or take everything you own - they can't.

Judgments are good for a long, long, time, so they can keep trying to collect on it for a long time. This will go on your credit reports (both if the account is joint) and it will pretty much keep you from getting any kind of credit or loans as long as its unpaid.

In short, this can make your life miserable for some time. The SOL on debts in TX is 4 years. If you're not sued before that 4 years runs out, then you would have a valid defense against any lawsuit that may be filed AFTER that time period runs out. 34K is a pretty fair chunk of change, Chase is likely to sue, particularly if you own property.

[bearfootball]

You need to contact Chase and find out the status of your account. Is there anyway you can refi your house and pay Chase off? At 5 1/2-7% on refi's I'd suggest you try that.

You can walk away, true, but your credit will be crap for 7 years. If you're willing to take that, then another option would be to let Chase sell it to a CA. After the 3rd or 4th CA buys the account for pennies on the $$, you could probably settle for about 10K....but that's a MAJOR maybe. With that amount, Chase might go after you, rather than selling to a CA.

And it is very likely Chase will go after you. We stopped paying on our Chase card several years ago right around the time I lost my son. Our debt was only $5000 though. All of our other cards we had paid off but held Chase. Right around the time we lost our son we didn't pay bills for a whole month and of course being late on our card, they upped the max interest rate on the thing. We being stubborn, decided to "show them" and discontinued payment.

Well, they showed us and two years later we were served with papers. We do have a judgement against us but we have worked with the lawyer representing Chase and have been able to make monthly payments. But without that, we were possibly looking at bank account freezes and all that fun stuff.

I was once also under the impression if we blew off the bill nothing would happen. How wrong we were. I'd try to settle now or make some sort of arrangement before it gets worse.

Good luck.

[chinabloo]

Chase has been very good to me so far. I owe a little over $12K and they put me on a 2 year program to pay $75 a month. I'm not quite sure what happens after that, but I have a ways to go before I get to that point.

Good luck!