Hey there, could the third time be the charm?

[curmudgeonGuy]

Hello hello!

 

I'm a long-time lurker, and I guess I posted a few times back in 2007.  I don't remember exactly lol, long time ago, but it shows on my profile.  I'm about to start my third journey in building personal credit.  Hope to be able to share my progress on here and seek advice of the brain trust.

 

Anyway, I've learned so much from this board. Full of great people and probably the best resource on the Internet for building/rebuilding credit.

 

Went through my first Chapter 7 in 2011. Doubled that up to 14 here in 2022 with a currently open Chapter 7.  Discharge expected any day now (last day to object is today).  Both bankruptcies were primarily due to businesses failing and then living off the credit until it inevitably ran out.

 

By way of a little info about me. I'm 45, from New Jersey, and have mostly run businesses most of my adult life.  So, I've had some successes and some failures.  The business that failed back prior to my first BK was something I took over after the death of my father, it was not in an area I had a lot of experience in, but I was able to keep it going till 2010.

 

This time I have a few businesses that are more in my field -- and I hope to keep building them.  In any event, I will also be building business credit and working very hard to avoid them from going belly up.  There are two principal businesses: One is a 503(c)(3) charity and the other is a business just getting into government contracting, along with some work for large corporates.  Both are in the tech realm -- IT services, and a charity in the IT realm.  I also have another for-profit that I use as a management company and/or for small projects from time to time.  I will be probably be building credit on that entity as well.  In the past, not being able to have decent access to working cash flow has held the businesses back, and I'm going to be looking to mitigate that to the extent that I can.

 

I regret that the businesses failed, but I have learned many lessons from these failures.  However, I do not regret doing what I had to do to keep afloat personally and business-wise when things started to decline.  If you have the choice between being out on the street or maxing credit lines, I'd choose to max the lines every time.  I must also honestly say that I lacked maturity with the earlier businesses, was thrown into it after Dad died, and wasn't ready to stick to the grind stone and work work work. I was not yet mature enough to recognize the importance in doing that, and spent too much time in the clubs etc.  That's certainly not going to be happening, I've moved past that life.  I'm really looking forward to putting in the work to build these businesses and the opportunities they will create in my life.

 

I'll be posting as I get going and hope to use as many best practices as possible this time around. I'm also going to read up many of the pinned threads to have a good base level of knowledge. Some of this I'm sure I already know, but I'm down for a refresher.  I appreciate any help that is given and will do my best to help others with questions or that need other help that I can provide.  Please also don't be shy if I do something wrong, break a rule or something on the forums.  I'm going to try not to, going to look for pinned posts with "list of rules" sounding titles, as soon as I submit this post.  But by all means, if I do something wrong, let me know, and it won't happen again.

 

Thanks for reading this, and I hope you're having a good day!