Major debt trying to get my Secrete clearance

I have a major amount of debt and have experienced many life changing event this year such as, "long-term unemployment, divorced and moved out of home. I am employed but not making enough to pay my debt and had fallen behind. I started down the path with a debt relief company. They told me to stop making payment on my debt. Then doing more online research found that bankruptcy may be a better choice if I wanted to get a clearance. So, I started down that path to have them tell me to stop paying my debt. When I filled out my paperwork I addressed all of this and then was told. STOP, do not file bankruptcy as you will loose your interim clearance. Now I am drowning in all of this debt and need someone that can actually give me sound advice on how to resolve this issue and still get my clearance…

Do you have an interim clearance? If not, you are not likely to get one anyway. Both because of your issue and because they just don’t do that many anymore. Stopping payments will not look good to an adjudicator even if you were directed by a debt relief company. There are all sorts of ways to handle excessive debt but not all are conducive to getting or holding a clearance. You can clear even with debt issues (ask me how I know that) but it will be a long process. Likely 18 months or more and you will have to be making progress during that time.

You have a few ways forward: My first piece of advice is to find a job that will allow you to make payments. This is not likely to be a cleared position. You need a good paying job to get yourself going. You can’t only look at cleared work because your clearance is too far in the future.

At the same time, you can process for a clearance. I’m assuming that you have a company willing to put into the process. When it eventually comes through, you can decide to continue where you are working or take the cleared job.

Lastly, you can stop any application for clearance and your problems into a better place and THEN go back and look for cleared work. Even in this case, clearing is going to take time and work because they are going to investigate your debt even if it is all current at the time.

Don’t bother with any company that is going to require that you qualify for an interim. You will not get it.

I hope this helps . . . I’m working with the information that you provided which means that I made some assumptions.

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