Bankruptcy

How To Rebuild Credit After Bankruptcy

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Filing bankruptcy hammers your credit score. In addition to all of your credit lines being marked as discharged in bankruptcy, the bankruptcy itself counts against your credit score. Fortunately, your credit begins rebuilding immediately. Unfortunately, you might not be getting all of the “credit” you deserve. Credit Lines Closed in Bankruptcy For some people who file bankruptcy, the process ends with every line of credit they have being discharged. At this point, no payments of any kind are made to the creditors, and their financial life starts over. However, many people end up continuing to make payments on certain credit lines. For example, if you have a car loan, and you want to keep your car, you have to keep making payments or it will be repossessed by the lender. (A bankruptcy erases the loan, it does not erase the right to collect the collateral that you secured the loan with.) If the loan was discharged in bankruptcy, the lender will no longer attempt to collect the debt. You have to make payments on your own. In addition, the lender will no longer report any information about your payments (good or bad) to the credit bureaus, so you won’t get …

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Keep Home in Bankruptcy

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After yesterday’s post about rebuilding credit after bankruptcy, I got two different questions about how to keep your home during bankruptcy. One of the readers seemed a bit frustrated and finished by asking, “Why can’t I get a simple answer to this question: Can I keep my home if I file bankruptcy?” The simple answer is: Yes, you can keep your home if you file bankruptcy, but only if you do the right things. I suspect it is that, but only if, part that is causing the answer to not seem simple, so let’s break it down. Keeping Your House After Filing Bankruptcy First, it is important to understand that a home mortgage is a secured loan. The security, or collateral, for the loan is the home. If the debt is not repaid, then the lender may take the collateral and sell it in order to pay off the loan. Now, just like any other debt, a mortgage can be discharged in bankruptcy. Doing so means that the lender may no longer attempt to collect the debt. So far, so good. However, the lien, or the right to take possession of the loan’s collateral is NOT discharged, or affected in …

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Best Time to File Bankruptcy

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While there is never a good time to file bankruptcy, there are some things that make filing bankruptcy at a certain time more or less advantageous for the filer. Making sure you understand the various bankruptcy rules and timing a bankruptcy filing correctly can save you some time and money. Good Time to File Bankruptcy One of the things that trips many bankruptcy filers up, even after speaking with a bankruptcy attorney, is that the bankruptcy court will take 40 percent of your unpaid earnings. If you get paid once per month, this can be a very big deal. For example, if you get paid on the 30th of each month and you file your bankruptcy petition with the court on the 28th, you will have to pay almost half the amount of your pay check to the bankruptcy trustee. In a case like this, you would be much better off waiting the following month to file for bankruptcy. However, there is a catch. You don’t want to file too soon after being paid because the other thing that the bankruptcy court is entitled to is almost all of the cash in your bank accounts on the day you file. For example, …

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