My client asked me this last week as we were going through her final papers for her Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing. I told her the easy way I think of them: property that is exempt from being liquidated by the case trustee. In my state of New Mexico, you generally can choose between using the [...]
filing for bankruptcy
When you file bankruptcy, you claim “exemptions” in property you wish to keep free of any claims of the bankruptcy trustee. And the “homestead” exemption–the exemption used to protect your home–is the most important exemption for many debtors. But what if your home is the movable kind? And I’m not just talking about mobile homes [...]
Often people come to see me who have been working with a debt settlement company but are unable to manage the payments to the debt settlement company or get discouraged with the whole process. How can bankruptcy be better? To be clear, a debt settlement company is an entity that will take your money in [...]
The other day I spoke with a young couple with a history. The wife and her best friend had been friends since they were five years old. They had grown up next to each other and were otherwise always together. When the house next door came available for purchase (at the top of the market) [...]
Filing bankruptcy is usually an administrative process. Information is gathered, forms filled out, and there’s a brief hearing conducted by a trustee. But in some cases an “adversary proceeding” occurs. An adversary proceeding is essentially a case within a case. It’s a lawsuit within your case about something related to the bankruptcy case. All this [...]
