Your decision to file for bankruptcy should involve a great deal of thought and discussion with both your loved ones as well as your legal counsel.  Once filed, a bankruptcy carries with it some significant consequences.
First, your credit will be affected if you are bankruptcy for one day, one month, one year, or longer.  Credit [...]

Last month I wrote a post about problems I had been having accessing the Bankruptcy Court’s ECF system and a workaround to solve that problem.  In that post I spoke about a problem that arises when your browser sees the ECF bankruptcy pleading filing screen as a disallowed pop-up, thereby leaving you with a blank [...]

Many Chapter 13 cases arise from mortgage payment problems.  A significant number of Chapter 13 debtors enter into bankruptcy with a mortgage arrearage and they use the arrearage cure mechanism of Chapter 13 to stop the foreclosure process and to pay back the missed mortgage payments over time.
Unfortunately many of the budget and cash flow [...]

I am writing this post for the benefit of fellow lawyers and other colleagues who may be having the same problems I have accessing bankruptcy court records electronically.  If you use Firefox (Mozilla) or Opera as your browser, you will notice that your browser software periodically updates, and sometimes those updates create unintended consequences.  Similarly, [...]

Question: When is it a good idea to hide from your lawyer, refusing to return his calls and ignoring a pending court date?  Answer: never.
I experienced this situation last week in a case involving a Chapter 13 client who had completed almost 4 1/2 years of a 5 year plan, then ended up with a [...]

In the real world, families help each other.  Sometimes this help can be in the form of co-signing a debt or even entering into debt to help a family member.  In my practice I frequently see situations where an adult child signs as the sole or primary mortgagee for a parent’s house.  Sometimes a parent [...]

Much has been written on this blog about the two different types of budgets required in many bankruptcy filings.  If your average income – calculated by looking at your household earnings for the six months prior to the month of filing – is over the “median income” for a similarly sized family in your State, [...]

As credit card debt underlies many bankruptcy filings, it is not surprising that prospective bankruptcy filers want to know if they should stop paying credit card debt if they plan to file for bankruptcy.
At first blush, the answer to this question should be obvious – why should anyone “throw good money after bad?”  However, I [...]

Although most of the posts on this blog relate to questions about filing for bankruptcy now, bankruptcy lawyers like me regularly receive questions from prior bankruptcy filers (sometimes old clients and sometimes individuals seeking information).   Here is a question I received from a woman who filed Chapter 7 pre-BAPCPA and is now having problems obtaining [...]

The reaffirmation process in Chapter 7 is a useful and widely used tool for debtors to keep and continue to pay for houses, cars, furniture, electronics and co-signed debts.  As I wrote in this blog back in February, 2008, reaffirmation will work in Chapter 7 if you have little or no equity in the collateral [...]