An Andover woman nearly lost her $600,000 home when she filed a routine consumer bankruptcy case recently — and her hair-raising adventure highlights one of the biggest traps out there for Massachusetts bankruptcy attorneys. The debtor in the Welch case owned a house worth $608K with a mortgage of $314K on it. She had filed [...]

If you hire a contractor to remodel your house, and the workers show up on expensive Harley-Davidson motorcycles, that’s a good sign that the company is solvent enough to finish the job, right? Wrong. And it led to a long bout of ultimately losing litigation when the contractors filed for personal bankruptcy. Massachusetts chief bankruptcy [...]

Since bankruptcy lawyers work all day in the world of debt and shady loans, you would think they would come across violations of the usury laws, concerning illegally high interest rates, all the time. You would be wrong. For some reason, although millions of people file bankruptcy every year, invocations of state usury law is [...]

Here’s a twist that you don’t see everyday in the bankruptcy courts: a Massachusetts couple who filed a bankruptcy case were allowed claim a homestead exemption to protect their vacation condo in York Beach, Maine. Massachusetts bankruptcy judge Melvin Hoffman ruled that the federal homestead exemption — found at 11 USC section 522 (d) (1) [...]

Right after writing about the Stallworth case and the dangers of putting houses into trusts before filing a bankruptcy case — and telling the story of a Massachusetts man who lost a lot of home equity in bankruptcy court that way — there comes another Massachusetts bankruptcy case involving, you guessed it, trusts and the [...]

A recent dispute between a bankruptcy trustee and Citi Mortgage that went to bankruptcy court in Boston shows just how sloppy the mortgage industry got during the heady days of the real estate boom in the mid-2000s. Bankruptcy trustee Marc DiGiacomo filed a motion to eliminate a mortgage on a debtor’s home because it wasn’t [...]

What happens if you file a bankruptcy case, and then afterwards suddenly find the perfect buyer (i.e. one who can get financing and will actually go through with the purchase) for your home? A lot will depend on what chapter your case is filed under. If its a Chapter 7, like the majority of cases, [...]

The advantages of filing for bankruptcy — a clean slate, no more annoying debt collectors or court appearances — would be worthless if bankruptcy meant you ended up sleeping in a gutter. Fortunately, that sort of ending is virtually unheard of. There are so many people filing recently in the Merrimack Valley that any stigma [...]

Massachusetts has a generous homestead exemption, which comes in handy when a homeowner needs to file a bankruptcy case. Typically, up to $500,000 can be declared “exempt,” bankruptcy lingo for “untouchable by the bankruptcy court or trustee.” But there are always exceptions, and one South Shore homeowner who filed bankruptcy in 2009 just found out [...]

Hoping to modify your mortgage this year? The last thing this blog is about is killing hope, but good luck with that. Why are mortgage modifications so hard to get, in Massachusetts and elsewhere? Because your mortgage servicer really doesn’t want you to succeed! Amazing, but true. And that proposition now has some academic backing, [...]