There are two sides to recovering--the emotional and financial--and these are tips on how to recover from personal bankruptcy in both arenas.

While it's important to jump on improving your finances immediately after discharging your debts, the emotional toll of everything often holds people back to the point that it becomes important to try and start dealing with that, first. If you're still dealing with feelings of shame, embarrassment, guilt, or anger now is the time to face those and let them go. If you can't do it on your own, you need to talk to a counselor to get through it and move forward in your life. This is going to be a part of your life for years to come and will somehow find it's way into everything you do-so it's important that you don't try and hide from it or you'll be hiding from everything.

Bankruptcy is a tool that is there to help people in the situation you were in, and you used it. You don't need to feel guilty or ashamed about that for the rest of your life. Let it go.

Once you're ready to get going on your financial improvement, there is lots to do! The first thing to do is check your credit report and make sure that everything is marked "included in bankruptcy", this is very important. You don't want things still marked as overdue or open on there. You may have to call the companies, repeatedly, to get this fixed.

Then you need to do a whole list of things. If you keep up on trying to build credit over the next couple years you can have a decent score again in as little as two years, so keep working on this!

Save up an emergency fund so you have money in case anything comes up. Get a secured credit card, but only use it lightly. Try and do these things as soon as you can. Eventually you'll need to work on getting a loan, and building up your new financial history further.

Recovering from personal bankruptcy takes time, but you can move forward in your life and start over.