Actor Fred Thompson used to appear on my Sunday morning news program every week touting the benefits of a “government insured”, safe, reverse mortgage. Get the money you deserve to live the good life, he urged. I’m watching the aftermath of that sales pitch play out for one of my clients, and it’s not “the […]
IRS Shakedown Happening In Bankruptcy Court
The latest IRS scam is happening in bankruptcy, out in the open. Now usually when I write about IRS scams, I’m talking about genuine bad guys either pretending to be the IRS to hijack your money or pretending to be you to the IRS, to hijack your money. But nobody is pretending in the trick […]
How Avoiding Probate Ended Up In Bankruptcy
Do it yourself seems so industrious and self reliant. And we’ve been bombarded with books, speeches and courses on the evils of probate. So, I guess it should be no surprise when people try DIY schemes to both avoid probate and avoid lawyers who create probate-avoiding trusts. Yet they forget an unavoidable truth: the transfer […]
Loan Modification: The $100,000 Mistake
The job of a mortgage servicer is to collect loan payments and keep track of what’s owed on the mortgage. That shouldn’t be too hard. But the evidence is that they don’t do that basic job very well. Throw a loan modification into the mix, and who knows what you’ll get. Accounting for modification […]
How Their Telephone Can Ruin Elders
The elderly couple was suddenly in financial trouble. The two mortgages on their home were a couple of months delinquent. Their bank account had just been levied by the state taxing authority. They hadn’t filed tax returns since 2009. From the outside, it didn’t seem like anything had changed. Yet their financial world was imploding. […]
Who Files Bankruptcy In The Face Of Booming Bay Area Economy?
Silicon Valley is booming; our highways are so full of people getting to work that we can’t get to work. Employment is approaching the level of the dot.com bubble. Property values soar. So who needs bankruptcy in this pocket of prosperity? All kinds of people, it turns out. Let’s look at the people who sought me […]
Drive-in bankruptcy?
We got a call about three o’clock the other afternoon from someone who wanted to come in that afternoon and file bankruptcy that day. When my partner hesitated, the caller responded, “Well , you are open now aren’t you?” I had a mental image of one of those parking lot, drive up coffee vendors, selling […]
New Bankruptcy Trends From An Old Hand
I’m seeing a real change in the people seeing me about filing bankruptcy. Used to be, the problem was credit card debt, unemployment, or divorce. A surprising trend over the past six months is developing. I acknowledge the sample size is small. Statistically, you can challenge the significance, but here are the trends. My office is […]
When Realtors Go Rogue
True story from the mortgage meltdown 10 years ago. Usually, I try to be the voice of common sense, conservation of energy, and moving on after a debacle. The client I saw the other day had the warrior side of me overwhelming the lawyer’s logic. The facts: the client, an immigrant carpenter with limited English […]
Spotting The Mean In The Means Test
Just being a consumer is enough to put you on Congress’s bad side when it comes to bankruptcy. How do I know? I read the “reformed” bankruptcy code. Only those individuals whose debts are primarily consumer debts have to prove that they aren’t abusing the bankruptcy laws. The Bankruptcy Code attempts to exclude from its […]
