Posted on July 06, 2016 in Mortgage

You have much, much more time to catch up on unpaid mortgage payments, as well as any unpaid property taxes.

Last week we wrote a blog post that listed 10 ways Chapter 13 helps you keep your home. Here’s the first of those ways it can help:

1. Gives You More Time to Catch up on Unpaid Mortgage Payments

Chapter 7 usually gives you a very limited amount of time, usually a year at the most, to catch up on your mortgage loan. In contrast Chapter 13 often gives you years to catch up. This can greatly reduce how much you have to pay each month to eventually get current. The much lower catch-up payments per month can be crucial. That’s especially true if you are many thousands of dollars behind on your mortgage(s). Having so much more time to cure the arrearage often makes the difference between losing your home and keeping it.

We recognize that this explanation might be a little dry. So today let’s see if we can bring it to life and have you can see how this Chapter 13 benefit could really help you.

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 Posted on July 04, 2016 in Bankruptcy

This 4^th of July make your move towards financial freedom. Get informed. You’ll feel tons better once you know your options.

We take this break from our ongoing series of blog posts on secured debts this 4th of July to talk about freedom from debt.

Your Life Today

If you’re reading this most likely you’ve got some rather serious financial problems. Most likely your debts are overwhelming you, worrying you all the time.

You’ve probably been trying to improve your situation for a long time, likely for years. It’s really affected your life. It hasn’t helped your personal relationships. The anxiety is impacting your health. It’s hard to feel good about yourself, to be happy or relaxed.

It’s difficult to take care of your basic daily needs, and of those who depend on you. It’s frustrating to think about the long-term responsibilities that you aren’t getting ahead on, like saving for retirement.

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 Posted on July 01, 2016 in Mortgage

These 10 tools, especially used in combination, can defeat your mortgage debt and other home-based challenges.

A few blog posts ago we said that while Chapter 7 “straight bankruptcy” strengthens your hand with your secured debts, Chapter 13 can be much stronger. One way that Chapter 13 is stronger is in enabling you to keep things you own which have a secured creditor’s lien on them. Indeed, that’s probably the most common reason for filing a Chapter 13 case—to keep your home, vehicle, and/or other possessions at risk of repossession.

Because Chapter 13 can help you in so many ways keep assets with liens on them, we’ll focus today on just one of those assets, your home. Here are 10 ways that this tool helps you stay in your home.

1. More Time to Catch up on Unpaid Mortgage Payments

Chapter 7 usually gives you a very limited amount of time, usually a year at the most, to catch up. Chapter 13 often gives you years, which greatly reduces how much you have to pay each month to eventually get current. If you are many thousands of dollars behind on your mortgage(s) having so much more time to cure the arrearage often makes the difference between losing your home and keeping it.

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 Posted on June 29, 2016 in Automatic Stay

Because of Chapter 13’s much more powerful automatic stay, its ability to prevent judgment liens and tax liens is extremely valuable.

Our last blog post described ways that the “automatic stay”—your protection from creditors’ collection actions—is so much more powerful in a Chapter 13 “adjustment of debts” case than in a Chapter 7 “straight bankruptcy.”

One way that this Chapter 13 protection from creditors is better is simply that it lasts much, much longer than under Chapter 7. This benefit is also related to today’s topic, how Chapter 13 can permanently stop unsecured creditors from turning their debts into secured ones. This is an underappreciated advantage of filing a Chapter 13 case.

Prevent Creditors from Turning Unsecured Debts into Secured Ones

Creditors with secured debts generally have much more leverage than those with unsecured debts. In a Chapter 7 case most unsecured debts get “discharged”—legally written off—without any payment required. In a Chapter 13 case unsecured debts are only paid if and to the extent there is any money left over during the course of the payment plan after paying secured creditors and special “priority” debts (such as unpaid child support and recent income taxes).

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 Posted on June 27, 2016 in Secured Debts

Chapter 7 strengthens your hand with your secured debts. But Chapter 13 can be much stronger. Starting with a more potent “automatic stay.”

The last blog post explained how filing a Chapter 7 “straight bankruptcy” can:

1) temporarily or permanently stop your secured creditors from taking your property in which they have a lien;

2) prevent a creditor with an unsecured debt from turning it into a secured one;

3) help you keep the property which has a creditor’s lien; and

4) if you want, enable you to surrender the collateral to the creditor without owing anything more on the debt thereafter.

However, another legal option, the Chapter 13 “adjustment of debts,” can often give you a whole lot stronger version of these four benefits than does a Chapter 7 case. You may not always need more help. But in many situations when you do, Chapter 13 can work wonders.

Because there are so many ways that Chapter 13 helps, we’ll cover these four benefits in four blog posts, starting with the first one today.

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 Posted on June 24, 2016 in Secured Debts

Stop secured creditors from taking your property, unsecured debts from turning into secured ones. Keep or surrender collateral as you wish.

Our last blog post a couple days was about secured debts. We explained that for a debt to be legally secured against something you own the creditor must go through certain steps to accomplish that, or else it won’t be secured. We showed how you could contractually enter into a secured debt voluntarily. But our blog post also showed that a creditor can turn its unsecured debt into a secured one by suing you or using other means of involuntarily imposing a lien on your possessions and/or real estate.

Today we look at how bankruptcy—specifically Chapter 7—can give you certain powers and advantages over your secured debts.

The Chapter 7 Powers Over Secured Debts

When you file a Chapter 7 “straight bankruptcy” case, doing so:

1) stops your creditor from taking your property which secures a secured debt;

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 Posted on June 22, 2016 in Secured Debts

Creditors with secured debts often have much more leverage against you than with unsecured debts.

The last couple months we have been discussing your bankruptcy options with debts secured by your vehicle, by your home, and by investment or business real estate. You can have debts secured by many other kinds of security—furniture and appliances, other personal property you buy or else had owned beforehand, business equipment and inventory, personal possessions that are subject to an income tax or judgment lien. These are just some of the possibilities. Before we get into these, and how bankruptcy handles them, let’s get a better understanding of secured debts in general.

Secured Debts

It’s quite simple. An unsecured debt is not legally tied to any interest in or right to anything you own. A secured debt IS legally tied to something you own through a lien on it. A lien is defined in the U.S. Bankruptcy Code as a “charge against or interest in [your] property to secure payment of a debt or performance of an obligation.” (Section 101(37).)

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 Posted on June 08, 2016 in Child And Spousal Support

A support obligation is a very special kind of debt, and the resulting lien on your home has to be dealt with in a very special way.

Support—A Very Special Debt

If you are behind on child or spousal support then you owe a debt that is treated differently both outside and inside bankruptcy.

Before you file bankruptcy, your ex-spouse and support enforcement agencies have very aggressive tools they can use against you, your income, and your assets to try to make you catch up on unpaid support.

If you own a home, those tools include a lien that is very likely imposed on your home’s title in the amount that you owe.

Some of the support collection tools that can be used against you, including the support lien on your home, are affected when you file bankruptcy and some are not. It depends on the circumstances and especially on whether you file a Chapter 7 “straight bankruptcy” or a Chapter 13 “adjustment of debts.” Chapter 13 gives you a much more powerful way to fight back.

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 Posted on June 06, 2016 in Secured Debts

Bankruptcy cannot remove contractor’s liens or other statutory liens from your home, but both Chapter 7 and 13 can help you deal with them.

A bankruptcy “discharge” legally and permanently wipes out your personal liability for most debts.

But it doesn’t automatically remove liens from your home. Each different type of lien is dealt with differently in bankruptcy, so it can certainly be confusing. The blog posts of the past three weeks have been about these difference, regarding liens securing first and second mortgages, property taxes, income taxes and judgments.

Today we’re talking about a category that does not get much attention on bankruptcy lawyer’s websites, “statutory liens.”

What’s a “Statutory Lien”?

The Bankruptcy Code defines a statutory lien as a lien “arising solely by force of a statute.” See Section 101(53).

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 Posted on June 03, 2016 in Creditor Lawsuits

The potential ability to get rid of judgment liens from your home’s title is an impressive benefit of bankruptcy.

Our last blog post was about preventing a creditor from getting a judgment against you, and from getting a judgment lien on your home. Today’s is about erasing a judgment lien from your home after it has already attached.

It’s important: because of how much damage a judgment lien can cause, you can greatly help yourself by filing a bankruptcy case either to stop a judgment lien from attaching to your home or to erase one that has attached earlier.

The Damage Caused by a Judgment Lien

A judgment lien can turn a debt you owe that is unsecured—does not legally attach to anything you own—into a secured debt—secured by what you own, such as your home. So the existence of a judgment lien can take a debt that you can discharge—fully and permanently write off in bankruptcy—into a debt that you must pay in full. And until it is paid, it can haunt you and your home for many years.

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