Category Archives: Practical tips

Many debtors are frightened the night before they have to attend the meeting of creditors in their bankruptcy case. (A few are frightened for months before, but that’s a story for another day). Most of this nervous energy is terribly misplaced. In the first place, “meeting of creditors” is usually a misnomer; “meeting with the […]

It’s an old joke in the legal profession: A new lawyer armed with an expensive diploma still has find his way to the courthouse before he can start practicing any law. And if you are filing a bankruptcy case, you are in the same predicament. Bankruptcy cases are assigned to a division of the bankruptcy […]

The folks at Filing Bankruptcy Now have a good message posted on their site: Focus your attention on positive action, despite your need to go through a bankruptcy case. Their main point is that “with all this bad news out there it’s hard to find the silver lining if you are one of these that […]

Imagine you’ve been thinking of filing for bankruptcy (as well as a divorce). You’re living in a house in North Andover, but your spouse has just moved out an got an apartment in Methuen. More bad news for you right, if you have to pay for two bankruptcies instead of one? Perhaps, but not necessarily. […]

When you file a Chapter 7 bankruptcy case in either Massachusetts or New Hampshire, at the moment of filing you have no idea who the bankruptcy trustee that will be handling your case will be. Welcome to trustee roulette! Different trustees have different practices, attitudes, and inclinations. All of which can affect cases in subtle […]

Bankruptcy lawyer Wendell Sherk recently wrote a nice article about what he called the “one-bite rule” in bankruptcy. Simply put, this is not a real rule, but the notion that creditors can get away with a little bit of harassment even after a bankruptcy case is filed — one last bite of the apple, so […]

If you started plucking people off the street and asking them at random what the process of filing for bankruptcy involved, you would find that most people imagine in their head a sort-of real estate closing gone berserk — piles and piles of legalese being shoved at them for the old John Hancock. They would […]

Sometimes dealing with legal matters is like walking through a minefield of complexity — court opinions that don’t agree, statutory language that can’t be figured out even with a law degree, and all that legalese that applies as soon as you click “accept.” In the bankruptcy courts, however, there is one cardinal rule that is […]