The Surprising Benefits: A "Preference" Payment to a Relative or Friend

 Posted on April 09, 2018 in Bankruptcy Law

A preferential payment to a favored creditor—a relative or friend—can be a problem, but one which usually has a workable solution.

Our last two blog posts have been about one of the more confusing parts of bankruptcy: the law of preferences. This law says that if a creditor takes or receives money from you within the 90 days before you file your bankruptcy case, the creditor may need to pay it back. A creditor would not pay that money to you but rather to your Chapter 7 bankruptcy trustee. The trustee would then pay out that money to creditors based on a priorities schedule in bankruptcy law.

Our last blog post was about how that priority schedule could result in most of that money going to a creditor you need and want to be paid. One example we used was a recent income tax debt. That can’t be discharged (written off) in bankruptcy. So preference law could result in the trustee getting some money back from a creditor you don’t care about to pay the tax debt so you don’t have to.

Preference Payments You DON’T Want Undone

But preference payments don’t just involve creditors you don’t care about. You may well not lose sleep over a trustee forcing a credit card company to return $1,000 it garnished from you on the eve of your bankruptcy filing. But what if you’d paid $1,000 on a personal loan to your brother or grandmother 6 months before filing bankruptcy? You’d promised to pay him or her back as soon as you got your tax refund, for example. So you did pay the $1,000. He or she really needed the money, and you felt huge emotional and ethical pressure to pay it. It was the right thing to do.

But now you hear from your bankruptcy lawyer that a Chapter 7 trustee could force your brother or grandmother to pay back that money. You feel that would be crazy, and wrong. Your brother or grandmother has long ago spent the $1,000 you paid on the loan. It would really be hard on them to now turn around and pay $1,000 to your trustee. In fact maybe one reason you paid off this debt was so that he or she would not be involved in your anticipated bankruptcy case. You may prefer that your relative not find out about you having to file bankruptcy. You can’t think of anything worse than he or she getting a demand from the trustee to pay the $1,000. This prospect may well turn you off about filing bankruptcy altogether.

The Solutions

However, this problem has a number of likely practical solutions. We’ll list them here and give brief explanations. Then next week we’ll expand on them to make sure they make sense.

1. Wait to File Until after the Preference Look-Back Period: With “insiders”—relatives and potentially anybody close to you--the look-back period is a full year before filing. It’s not just 90 days back, as it is with non-insiders. Regardless, especially if you are getting close to a year since your preferential payment, consider waiting long enough to avoid the problem altogether.

2. Persuade Trustee Not to Pursue the Preferential Payment: Your relative or other favored person that you paid may genuinely be unable to pay the $1,000 or whatever you paid. He or she may have no legally reachable income or assets. The trustee won’t want to waste money to pay his or her lawyer to fruitlessly pursue a preferential payment.

3. Offer to Pay the Trustee a Reduced Amount Yourself: The trustee will usually not care where the preference money comes from—from the relative or other creditor who got your money, or anywhere else. So you could offer to pay that $1,000 or whatever that sum of money yourself. The trustee may even take monthly payments from you. Also, he or she may accept less than the full preference payment amount, subtracting what it would have cost in attorney fees and other costs for him or her to get it from your relative.

4. File a Chapter 13 Case to Prevent Pursuit of the Preferential Payment: Chapter 13 “adjustment of debts” often provides a very good solution. It works particularly if 1) you need to do a Chapter 13 anyway, 2) the preferential payment is large, and/or 3) none of the above solutions will work.

Next Time...

We’ll explain these four in our next blog post. The bottom line until then: a preferential payment to a relative and other favored creditor can be a scary problem, but it’s one that usually has a very sensible practical solution.