utomatic Stay. Upon filing bankruptcy, whether Chapter 7, Chapter 11, Chapter 13, an automatic stay is imposed preventing creditors from taking ANY collection action against you: telephone calls, letters, lawsuits, garnishments, repossessions, foreclosures, all stopped. Automatically. No judge even looks at the paperwork. Although there is no paper anymore, all bankruptcy courts now use electronic…
Michigan bankruptcy clients forget creditors all the time. Or, don’t even know they owe some body money, especially medical bills, which often show up months later. Some people panic: I already had my bankruptcy hearing, is it too late? How much trouble am I in? Will I have to pay this bill?
Creditors may not all look like this. OK, probably none of them do. But that is what some of them make us think they are, on their way to bashing our heads in if we don’t fork over the loot. Loot that we don’t have. The bankruptcy code defines creditor as: (A) entity that…
“I am being sued by capital one for a credit card debt…I’m unemployed…will I still have to pay if I lose in court?” Someone posted this question to me. I never know what the enemy may do, but, here are the possibilities: So here comes the long winded answer about money judgments in St. Clair…
Had a different question last week, from someone who did not reaffirm her mortgage in her Chapter 7 case, kept current on the payments, but wanted to pay off the balance for less than what was owed on the mortgage balance. REAFFIRMATION Just to review, reaffirmation is the process for you to obligate yourself…
No, it does not mean you have no property, that you lost everything by filing Chapter 7. Actually, it means that the trustee found no assets to be liquidated for the benefit of creditors. Which is a good thing, you keep everything you had before you filed. Subject to paying any liens on the property,…
Many clients ask me who will find out if I file bankruptcy? Does my boss have to know? I don’t want my relatives and friends to find out. All court proceedings are matters of public record, unless the Judge orders the records sealed at the request of a party, and it must be for special…
Now, if you or I were owed $45.9 billion dollars, in a bunch of states, by a bunch of people, and had over 1,000 lawsuits going to get some of that money back, what would it mean if, all of a sudden, we dropped those suits? It would mean we got religion, decided…
The creditor lobby would have you believe that people who file bankruptcy are the ones committing fraud. They sold the bankruptcy law reforms as a way to stop the rampant fraud going on, people filing bankruptcy to skip out on their debts, debts which they could afford to pay. That was the company line. Debt…
(image from hikojune.xanga.com website) The means test was made law in 2005, at the behest of the creditor lobby to stop abusive bankruptcy filings, which were supposedly costing the average American family $400 per year.. An obtuse formula is used to weed out those who supposedly can afford to pay something to their…
