I applaud attorneys who make sound information about bankruptcy available to the public. My only requirement is that their information be true. The truth is income taxes are dischargeable in bankruptcy if 3 reasonably simple conditions are met; debts to the government are generally dischargeable in bankruptcy. Please reread that line, and get that bit…
I am a mortgage law attorney. I am not a bankruptcy attorney. I never have been. But in the current financial climate, I see clients in my office daily who desperately need to file bankruptcy…And they won’t. The reasons they give, and the parade of horrors they’ve built up in their minds about bankruptcy,…
I cringe when a client says that they’ve researched bankruptcy on the internet before making an appointment with me. For every sound, balanced, nuanced article on consumers and their debts, there are bunches of sloppy, inaccurate sites, often trying to make bankruptcy so frightening that you’ll buy whatever they’re selling. But when a group…
In my bankruptcy alphabet, T stands for Tension. I’m not talking so much about the tension the person filing bankruptcy feels, though that is real and not to be discounted. I’m talking about the tension in the law that balances the interests of creditors with the interests of debtors. Bankruptcy law in the US…
“D” is for discharge in my bankruptcy alphabet. Getting a discharge of debts is the goal of most bankruptcies. The discharge is the court order, issued at the conclusion of a case, that wipes out the filer’s personal liability for most debts that existed when he began the case. Not everything is discharged. The Bankruptcy…
Counseling, delivered by an approved provider, before the bankruptcy case is filed, is now a requirement enforceable by dismissal of the case. That’s my “C” word in the bankruptcy alphabet. Prebankruptcy counseling is supposed to insert an objective third party between the beleaguered individual who needs relief and the greedy lawyer who, according to…
May make you a felon. Funny, the Las Vegas PR doesn’t mention criminal prosecution for unpaid gambling markers. Yet Nevada treats gambling markers like negotiable instruments (i.e. checks) and failure to satisfy a marker within 30 days can lead to criminal charges. Most bankruptcy courts have held that gambling debts are dischargeable in bankruptcy, since…
I sat in a courtroom last week and watched dozens of Chapter 13 cases get dismissed, often because the debtor had not taken seriously the requirement that all their tax returns be filed within 45 days of the commencement of the case. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that folks who didn’t take filing tax returns…
From the questions I answer from clients in my office and netizens on Lawyers.com, lots of people think that bankruptcy trustees are the last word in the bankruptcy world. Not so: the trustee is an interested party, generally tasked with representing the creditors as a group and ensuring that bankruptcy cases comply with the law….
