If you have been looking around on the Internet for financial or bankruptcy information, there’s plenty of it out there, but you gotta know who you can trust. If you’re looking specifically for bankruptcy information, we hope you will trust this site. I try hard to keep it up to date and accurate. Until recently, [...]

Bankruptcy and divorce — those handmaidens of a whopping mid-life crisis — are serviced by competing court systems with competing and confusing rules and requirements. Here is a guide to (at least partially) untangling the mess. First, since 2005 there has been a notion in the bankruptcy courts of something called a “domestic support order,” [...]

Confused about the different “chapters” of the bankruptcy code? Here’s a very quick cheat sheet on Chapter 7, which is what the majority of people file. It’s a quick proceeding — by lawyer’s standards anyway — typically over and done in four months or less. If your family income is under the state average for [...]

If you file a Chapter 7 bankruptcy case, debtors with mainly consumer debts have to also file a “means test,” which proves they qualify for Chapter 7 relief based on their recent income. If you file Chapter 13 case, there is no pure means test (although there are qualifications), but you file a very similar [...]

Some people pass around a common bit of bad advice, to the effect that a person with no assets is “judgment proof” and therefore never needs to file a bankruptcy case. While there is a grain of truth in this assertion, as always, there is another side to the story. First, if a “no asset” [...]

Debtors with relatively high incomes who suddenly lose their job have some unique hurdles to clear if they need to consider bankruptcy. This is because the “means test” that calculates whether or not a debtor is eligible for a Chapter 7 discharge is a backwards-looking thing; all calculations are based on your earnings in the [...]

If you file a Chapter 7 bankruptcy case, are your creditors likely to object to it? Typically, the answer is no, although every bankruptcy attorney has war stories about the exceptions. And despite what you’d probably guess, objections are less likely to come from major credit card companies than they are from creditors whom you [...]

The Bankruptcy Code has a well deserved reputation for favoring consumers who litigate under it, but that doesn’t mean that consumer debtors win every case or every argument. A group of Florida debtors were handed a significant loss last week in their attempt to “strip off” second mortgages on their underwater homes. U. S. Bankruptcy [...]

You’ve just spent months trying to get a loan modification on the mortgage for your house, and today you found out you got accepted into their program. Congratulations! Or maybe not. What if your house isn’t worth as much as the loan, even the modified loan? We call that being underwater. Blub. Blub. Blub. No [...]

Did you know that most people who file a bankruptcy case will never see a bankruptcy court judge? There are exceptions, of course, but the vast majority of people filing bankruptcy in Massachusetts or New Hampshire never appear before a judge. They all have a meeting with a trustee, however, which is required by the [...]