When credit card debt goes bad, banks sometimes sell it to vulture investors at a steep discount. The vulture debt buyer then often tries to sue on the account to collect more than they paid. And their lawsuits are often the final straw forcing folks bankruptcy, where the debt buyer usually wants a share of [...]
Wendell Sherk, Missouri Bankruptcy Attorney
Why would anyone take out an Internet payday loan? Bankruptcy lawyers scream this out loud at least once a week. It tends to frighten the neighbors. Small, high interest loans are often the last gasp effort folks use to make payments on other debt (like mortgage or car loans) — before they give in and [...]
Getting compensated for injuries is personal. It’s meant to replace a loss to you as a person. Missouri exemption law recognizes that. Yet the recent evolution of those exemptions in bankruptcy (here, here, and here) has set up an unusual conflict between state and federal law. Until the Benn decision discussed previously, Missouri cases were [...]
In the on-going saga of Missouri bankruptcy exemptions, some apparently-settled debtor protections have recently been destabilized. And this caused an apparent split among bankruptcy judges on at least some of these protections. Recently, this on-going evolution visited the daily wages of consumers. Missouri has a law which protects a large portion of an individual’s income [...]
In the previous installment, we discussed the 8th Circuit’s Benn decision which began a sea change in Missouri bankruptcy exemptions. To see how Benn‘s unusual opinion created uncertainty in Missouri bankruptcies, one need look no further than our state teacher pension plans. Prior to 2010, almost no one seriously imagined a state employee’s pension plan [...]
Sometimes a strategy causes more harm than good. Many long-accepted Missouri bankruptcy exemptions have become uncertain or been lost due to one such case. This is the story of how one strategy blew up to create dangerous uncertainty for consumers. Bankruptcy exemptions dictate what stuff is protected from a bankruptcy trustee. As allowed by federal [...]
