California homeowners have new, powerful rights to stop a foreclosure sale and sell their homes themselves. The new law became effective January 1, 2025. When you’re faced with a foreclosure sale date and a Chapter 13 bankruptcy case won’t work, the CA legislature has created an opportunity for you to put off the foreclosure so […]
The Real Importance of Your Credit Score
Getting credit after bankruptcy is the most frequent search term that bring visitors to Bankruptcy in Brief, my encyclopedic sister site on bankruptcy. In these visitors’ minds, the impact of bankruptcy on their credit score is critical. It’s ironic that readers, saddled with enough debt to consider bankruptcy, worrymost about their credit score. After all, […]
Separate Finances Didn’t Protect Spouse From Financial Disaster
By keeping separate finances, this California couple thought they had insulated the wife from the financial woes of her entrepreneur husband. They didn’t share bank accounts nor credit cards while she carefully kept her distance from his business dealings. Her name was not on anything tied to his business. But “separate” isn’t enough to overcome […]
Is Home Equity A Substitute For Retirement Savings
My home is my retirement plan. If I had a dollar for every time a client said that, I could retire today. But that approach to funding your old age only works if…. Sell your house to retire The value in your house makes your balance sheet strong, but doesn’t put food on the table […]
Do I qualify for bankruptcy in the Bay Area?
The higher-than-average wages in the Bay Area don’t disqualify you from bankruptcy, despite rampant misinformation about the bankruptcy means test. The means test, added to bankruptcy law in 2005, was (poorly) designed to keep above-average earners out of bankruptcy. But it hasn’t worked in the Bay Area, largely because of the cost of housing here. […]
Cheat Sheet For Passing Bankruptcy Means Test
The bankruptcy means test has a fatal weakness in its attempt to keep people out of bankruptcy. Like so much recently, it’s health care. It’s health care, in the future, to be paid before your creditors get any money in your bankruptcy. It works because, in a logic that only Congress could employ, the means […]
Bouncing Back From Bankruptcy
How long does it take to recover from bankruptcy? I started to answer the client’s question before I realized that the question was all backward. Recover FROM bankruptcy? No…. It should be: recover THROUGH bankruptcy! Bankruptcy is the tool for recovering from impossible financial situations. The ailment is debt: bills in excess of what you […]
Inclusion in Bankruptcy Doesn’t Equal “Discharged”
Convincing clients that all of their debts must be included in bankruptcy is one of the hardest parts of being a bankruptcy lawyer. The struggle often seems Herculean. Sometimes, they will tell me they don’t want to include their car loan in the case because they “need the car”. Sometimes I find the student loan payment […]
Eliminate The Tax Refund & Protect Yourself From Government Collections
We’ve recently heard sternvoiced threats from the federal government about collecting delinquent student loans and defaulted EIDL loans. One of their collection tools is the Treasury Offset Program. It allows the feds to take some or even all of money is owes you to pay money that you owe the government. So many people plan […]
Is It Too Late For Bankruptcy?
Worried that it’s too late to file bankruptcy? You’ve put off considering bankruptcy, hoping to tough it out, or hoping for a miracle. But at some point, time runs out: you’ve been served with a lawsuit; judgment has been entered against you; or even, a garnishment appears on your paycheck. Is it too late to […]
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