I saw a promotion for savings on the TV last night. ING, bless their heart, was touting the benefits of savings. One of my criticisms about our consumer society and the level of financial literacy in this country is the huge expenditure of time and talent to get us to spend more. There is no […]
Collection law suits in California (2)
I wrote earlier about the erroneous assumptions that clients make when they are served with a suit for money owed. The first is that there is an immediate, life changing emergency. The second, which I want to explore today, is that they have a court date some months in the future. Wrong. California law provides […]
Tax issues in subprime mortgage meltdown
Two tax issues popped up as I discussed impending foreclosures with a client with several investment properties. Remember that a foreclosure sale is treated for tax purposes as though it was an actual sale, with the winning bid treated as though the property owner got the money. The result is that a capital gain may […]
Teaching about Money
JumpStart, a national coalition of financial education organizations, tested high school seniors on financial literacy: the average score was an F-! No wonder young adults get caught up in the credit trap right out of school. I see financial illiteracy in their parents, as well. So many of my clients seem to measure their financial […]
Card Companies Charge Forward
At a hearing on the effect of the bankruptcy “reform” bill held in the Senate right after the fall elections, the American Bankers Association piously testified about the care with which its member banks solicit new credit card accounts. The blame for debt that a consumer could not repay was not, they recited, the result […]
Preserving a Small Business through Bankruptcy
Chip Parker and I have been writing about bankruptcy issues for the self employed over on the BankruptcyLawNetwork.Chip pointed out that the bankruptcy of the shareholder does not protect the operations of a corporation that the debtor owns, since the corporation is not in bankruptcy, the shareholder is.The flip side of that proposition is that […]
Find The Best Bankruptcy Information Online
Need to understand bankruptcy? Just Google it. No issue is too important or complicated that we doubt we can understand it by reading on the ‘net. The computer has replaced the library as our first response to an unknown. Even my 85 year old mother, a computer novice, reacts to an information vacuum by heading to […]
The Price of Keeping the Car
Car manufacturers lobbied Congress to make it harder for debtors to keep their cars through bankruptcy. And they got what they sought. In Chapter 7, that was accomplished by eliminating the “ipso facto” clause, which said that merely filing bankruptcy was not a breach of the purchase contract. The expectation was that debtors would reaffirm […]
Misuse of Credit Scores
I try to dissuade clients from fixation on their credit score as a measure of financial health. I’ve seen too many clients sitting in my office with winning credit scores and so much debt they can’t pay it off in this world or the next. I have to wonder what that score is measuring. Atlanta […]
UST definitely family unfriendly
I sat this afternoon in a 341 meeting for Chapter 13 in which another debtor testified that he had converted his Chapter 7 case to one under Chapter 13 because the UST objected to the support he provided to his 70 year old mother. The UST proposed to take the mother’s deposition in a city […]
