Your house – the place where you have lived in the past and plan to live in again – may not be your residence when you file a bankruptcy petition. Does it matter? In several ways it might matter a great deal. It may be that when you filed your bankruptcy petition you listed your [...]
Exemptions In Bankruptcy
As tax season approaches, it’s a good time to talk about how (or whether) bankruptcy will affect your tax refund. A previous post dealt with how Chapter 7 might affect your tax refund; now let’s talk about how you tax refund will be treated in, and will affect, your Chapter 13 bankruptcy. Unlike a Chapter [...]
After you file a bankruptcy case, you are required to attend a meeting of creditors. This is scheduled for about a month after your petition is filed, and is usually the only appearance you will need to make during the bankruptcy process. Should you be nervous about it? Probably not, especially if your bankruptcy lawyer [...]
There are two main federal bankruptcy exemptions for “unmatured” insurance contracts, 11 U.S.C. § 522(d)(7) and (d)(8): (7) Any unmatured life insurance contract owned by the debtor, other than a credit life insurance contract. (8) The debtor’s aggregate interest, not to exceed in value $11,525 less any amount of property of the estate transferred in [...]
Exemptions are the laws that tell us how much property you can protect in the bankruptcy process. Recently those laws have been improved for Missouri and former Missouri filers. The new law will go into effect on August 28, 2012. Sponsored by hard-working State Rep. Kevin Elmer, despite a highly partisan and rancorous legislative session, [...]
The Massachusetts laws protecting cash value life insurance might as well be written in Middle English. They simply cannot be understood by anyone except the most persistent of us. Luckily, some recent court decisions help us find our way. Back in 2007, I expressed appreciation to U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Henry J. Boroff for his Shloss and Chevalier decisions. He [...]
