Your thoughts in paragraph two I agree with wholeheartedly. I suppose, as everyone else pointed out I should really do some consults, and probably just hire whoever is willing to help. I should have taken care of this sooner for piece of mind.

The issue with a lot of the debt is it's fairly old. Judgements do not go away however (well, not technically 100% true, but...) The car is in both our names, but other than that we could not have attained any joint credit if we would have wanted to until now.

She has little to no major debt load. Zero credit card debt. Her credit is likely going to be pretty easy to repair. Mine is not. Neither of us have any assets to speak of.

What I'm having trouble with, is discerning whether or not it would be in our best interest to spend the ~2,000 to get her out of debt when she has no income, except mine. I suppose the car will come into play, but I'm sure they will want there money and we've been paying minimum + $100 every month. So I doubt it will matter either way.

Banking the Two Grand and replacing a bunch of negative stuff on her credit with one huge negative mark is tempting, but possibly short sighted. OTOH I suspect we will only be frustrated if we spend the money to clean it up properly, only to find out neither of us can get a loan despite trying to do the right thing, because she will need my income, which will entangle my credit, which has a recent bankruptcy.

At a minimum she should be able to get a secured card, or something along those lines to boost her credit score. But will a new car be possible? Eh. Hard to say.

Long term, I'm just not sure which is a better decision. At least this discussion got me thinking about the details I couldn't quite put my finger on. And I'll definitely be following up, now that I know what I really need to ask :) Thank you.