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When a Chapter 7 “Straight Bankruptcy” Helps You Enough on Your Home

Posted by Kevin on February 11, 2019 under Bankruptcy Blog | Comments are off for this article

Chapter 13 Is a Powerful Package

If you want to keep your home but are behind on your mortgage payments, a Chapter 13 “adjustment of debts” is often what you need. It comes with an impressive set of tools to address many home debt problems. It gives you more time to catch up on the mortgage, may enable you to “strip” a second or third mortgage off your title, and gives you very helpful ways for dealing with property taxes, income tax liens, judgment liens, and such.

When Chapter 7 is Enough

But what if you have managed to fall only a few months behind on your mortgage, and could afford the payments if you just got relief from your other debts?

Or what if you aren’t even keeping the house, but do need a little more time to find another place to live?

Then you may not need a Chapter 13 case, and could save the extra time and cost that it would take compared to Chapter 7.

Buying Just Enough Time for What You Need

The “automatic stay”—the bankruptcy provision that stops virtually all actions by creditors against you or your property—applies to Chapter 7 just as it does to Chapter 13.  So the filing of a Chapter 7 case stops a foreclosure just as quickly as a Chapter 13 filing.

But Chapter 7 usually buys you much less time than a Chapter 13 could.

If you are not very far behind on your mortgage payment(s) and want to keep your home, when you file a Chapter 7 case your mortgage lenders will usually give you several months to catch up on your back payments. You must immediately start making your regular monthly payments, if you had not been making them, and must enter a strict schedule for catching up on the arrearage. In return the lender agrees to hold off foreclosing, as long as you make the payments as agreed.

Where do you get the money to make these extra payments?  By discharging your pre-petition debt in the Chapter 7, it could free up hundreds of dollars per month.  The key, then, is to make sure that you use that money to pay the mortgage arrearage and not spend it on other items.

If instead, you are not keeping the house but just need to have more time to save money for moving into a rental home, a well-timed Chapter 7 case will buy you more time in your house. During that time you don’t pay mortgage payments, enabling you to get together first and last month’s rent payment, any necessary security deposit and other moving costs.

The tough-to-answer question is how much extra time would a Chapter 7 filing give you. It mostly depends on how aggressive your mortgage company is about trying to start or restart the foreclosure efforts.  A pushy lender could, soon after you file your case, ask the bankruptcy court for “relief from the stay”—permission to start or restart the foreclosure process. If so, then your bankruptcy filing would buy you only an extra month or so.

Or on the other extreme, a mortgage lender could potentially take no action during the 3-4 months or so until your Chapter 7 case is finished. At that point the “automatic stay” protection expires, and the lender can start or restart the foreclosure. Or it may sit on its hands even longer.  Your bankruptcy attorney will likely have some experience in how aggressive your particular mortgage lender is under facts similar to yours.

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Your Bankruptcy Options If You Owe Income Taxes After Closing Your Business

Posted by Kevin on May 14, 2018 under Bankruptcy Blog | Comments are off for this article

Most people who close down a failed small business owe income taxes. Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 provide two very different solutions.

 

Here are the two options:

Chapter 7 “Straight Bankruptcy”

File a Chapter 7 case to discharge (permanently write off) most of your debts.  This can include some or even all of your income taxes. If you cannot discharge all of your taxes, right after your Chapter 7 is completed, you (or your attorney or accountant) would arrange a payout plan (either lump sum or over time) with the IRS or other taxing authorities.

Chapter 13 “Adjustment of Debts”

File a Chapter 13 case to discharge all the other debts that you can, and sometimes some or even all the taxes. If you cannot discharge a significant amount of your taxes, you then pay the remaining taxes through your Chapter 13 plan, while under continuous protection of the automatic stay against the IRS’s or state’s collection efforts.

The Income Tax Factor in Deciding Between Chapter 7 and 13

In real life, especially after a complicated process like closing a business, often many factors come into play in deciding between Chapter 7 and Chapter 13. But focusing here only on the income taxes you owe, the choice could be summarize with this key question: Would the amount of tax that you would still owe after completing a Chapter 7 case (if any) be small enough so that you could reliably make workable arrangements with the IRS/state to pay off or settle that obligation within a reasonable time?  If so, consider Chapter 7.  If not, then consider Chapter 13 which provides the automatic stay during the 5 year period allowed to pay taxes.

How Do You Know?

To find out whether you need Chapter 13 protection, you need to find out from your attorney the answers to two questions:

1) What tax debts will not be discharged in a Chapter 7 case?

2) What payment or settlement arrangements will you likely be able to make with the taxing authority to take care of those remaining taxes?

The IRS has some rather straightforward policies about how long an installment plan can last and how much has to be paid. In contrast, predicting whether or not the IRS/state will accept a particular “offer-in-compromise” to settle a debt can be much more difficult to predict.  Generally, it takes more attorney or accountant time to negotiate an offer in compromise, so the cost factor to the debtor should be considered.

When in doubt about whether you would be able to pay what the taxing authorities would require after a Chapter 7 case (either by installment plan or offer in compromise), or in doubt about some other way of resolving the tax debt, you may well be better off under the protections of Chapter 13.

 

 

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