You're free of your debts and should feel relief after everything is over, but instead you may end up overwhelmed and unsure of what to do after bankruptcy to start fresh. While you'll still carry that black mark on your credit report, there are still a lot of things you can do to help put all of that behind you.

One of the biggest obstacles to reaching new financial goals for people in their new lives is their emotional baggage. If you waste time feeling ashamed of this past it's easy to let it stop you from moving forward. You need to find a way to let go of this. The reason bankruptcy laws exist is because we all deserve a chance to start over when things get to be too much. No one is going to hand you a new life though, you'll have to work through this and reestablish a new history.

A good test for this will come up quite soon after all the paperwork has been finished. About a month after things have been finalized you'll want to get a new copy of your credit report. It's very common for companies to fail to mark your old debts as "included in bankruptcy". Instead they'll leave them on there marked as overdue or late or open. You need to call these companies and keep on them until they change it. If the person you're talking to is unhelpful ask to speak to their manager and they'll help you. Send them letters asking for it to be changed so that you have a paper trail. Keep on this until things are changed, because if you have both a bankruptcy and debt you owe on your report you're in a much worse situation.

Once that's all cleared up you'll need to start making a plan for building a new financial history. Your past won't fall off your report for seven years, but you can build up a new history on top of it much sooner than that. With a tight knit plan you can have a decent score in as little as two years, maybe three, and be able to have a healthy financial life. If you get on things right away and start looking at what to do after bankruptcy to start fresh you can put things behind you and have your finances become a much less stressful part of your life.