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“In bankruptcy, everything is upside down.  Bad is good; good is bad.”  I tell people that all the time. What does that mean?

For the bankruptcy court to approve your bankruptcy, we have to show why you can’t afford to pay.  It’s good for your financial situation to be bad. Things you do to cut expenses to keep paying your debts–they usually come back to bite you.  It’s bad to be good.

Early January 2011, the Supreme Court, in a decision called Ransom, added keeping your junker car to the list of things that make it harder to get your bankruptcy approved.

I want to be really clear on what this means to people like you.  Suppose you could have traded in your old car two years ago on a new one.  But you knew you couldn’t afford the car payment and still pay your credit cards.  So, you kept the old car, and kept trying to pay your credit cards.   According to the Supreme Court, that can make you a bankruptcy abuser.   Good is bad.

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Tags: Bankruptcy, Bankruptcy Don’t

The decision to choose between debt consolidation and bankruptcy arises if you have reached at a point where you simply can not keep up the payments regularly then you might have to consider either debt consolidation or bankruptcy as a debt solution.

Without having enough knowledge about each, it seems both are easy and effective to get rid of debt problems. Although both debt consolidation and bankruptcy has their own advantageous and disadvantageous, debt consolidation seems to be a better route when compared to bankruptcy because as most of the people think bankruptcy is the end of debt problems which is not the case.

Debt consolidation means consolidating all unsecured debt from different creditors into one large debt amount. To consolidate you must have to sign a contract with debt consolidation service provider, who will arrange consolidation loan with which you can pay off all the debt with creditors in one go and pay monthly to debt consolidation service provider.

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Tags: Bankruptcy, Debt Consolidation

Before the housing crisis, I warned all my Chapter 7 bankruptcy clients, “make sure you are current on your house the day we file your case.”  If you went into Chapter 7 bankruptcy even one payment behind, the mortgage company would get relief from the automatic stay, and they’d start to foreclose.  Once that train left the station, it was hard to stop.

That’s still a good plan if you can do it; but not everybody can.  If you file Chapter 7 bankruptcy while the house is behind, the motion for relief from stay is important, but it’s not time to panic.

What to do when you get a motion for relief from the automatic stay?

Robert Weed

1.  If you can afford the house payment, and you want to be certain you will keep the house, then you need to get caught up.  In fact, you really should be caught up when the bankruptcy is filed.  Everybody knows, if you really want to keep your house, you need to get current and stay current.  That applies before

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Tags: Bankruptcy, Bankruptcy Motion

Before bankruptcy, I like to meet with you and go over your credit report.    The credit report I like best is at experian.com/reportaccess.

One reason I like that report is big print.  (I’m 62 and I’ve worn glasses since I was 8.)  But the other reason is that Experian report shows the balance history of your credit cards.

We don’t get that balance history on credit reports from freecreditreport.com.  Even though freecreditreport.com is owned by Experian, the report you get there doesn’t have that detail.  And the print is a lot smaller.

(I hate them for another reason, too.  I don’t think something is “free” if you have to sign up for an annual subscription to get it.)

Knowing your balance history is important in the timing of your bankruptcy.

The bankruptcy code, at 11 USC 523(a), provides that the bank can object to discharging their debt if you made a “false representation.”

The “false representation” they like to bring up is the small print when you sign a charge slip.  The small print that says something li

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Tags: Bankruptcy, Bankruptcy Why

As a Virginia bankruptcy lawyer, I talk to about a dozen people a month who have already lost their home to foreclosure.  When we look at the credit reports together, the first mortgage usually shows foreclosed, with a balance of $0.   And talk about the question, after the foreclosure, do I still need to file bankruptcy?

For some people, the answer is obvious.  If there was a second mortgage on the foreclosed house–those almost always sue.  Usually within a year.   If the credit cards got out of control while trying to save the house, then people need to file bankruptcy to clean up the credit cards.

But what if the foreclosed first mortgage is the only problem?

Up to this point, I’ve told people I almost never see any effort by anyone to collect on those foreclosed first mortgages.  (A couple months ago I saw a couple being sued on a first mortgage forelcosure.  That mortgage had been a rural development loan backed by the Department of Agriculture. Don’t see much of that aro

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Tags: Bankruptcy, Bankruptcy Foreclosure