The sign on my office door should read: Armed and Dangerous Dangerous, anyway, if you are a mortgage servicer. I have a bunch more arrows in my quiver thanks to new bankruptcy rules and new regulations. Most of them relate to home ownership and mortgages. FRBP 3002.1 Sitting on my desk is a notice of […]
Can Family Court Order Discharged Spouse To Indemnify The Other?
File bankruptcy before or after a divorce? It’s the classic bankruptcy family law conundrum. We think about about bankruptcy addressing the claims of third parties against the spouses. But consider the impact of a bankruptcy discharge granted to one spouse prior to the resolution of the divorce. What are the options and alternatives for the […]
How To Wield Influence And Change The Rules Of The Game
Change is coming to the rules of bankruptcy that drive what we do and the forms we must use to do it. We can try to shape the change or just react against it. Or as the traditional wedding service exhorts: speak now or forever hold your peace. Public comment closing Feb. 15 The Rules […]
Domestic Support Obligations: When The Rules We Know Change
As bankruptcy lawyers, we’d like to get the world trained to simply halt in their tracks when a bankruptcy is filed and the automatic stay is invoked. It’s not so simple when there are family law proceedings afoot. Automatic stay Section 362(a) enjoins continuation of an action against the debtor to recover a claim or […]
Non Support Debts In Bankruptcy: Our Options Have Changed
Read the case annotations for Section 523(a)(15)of the Bankruptcy Code casually, and you can go really wrong. It’s like the phone tree admonition: listen carefully because our options have changed. Before 2005, the dischargeability of non support obligations to former spouse or child incurred by the debtor in the course of divorce might be dischargeable, […]
Loss Mitigation: The Rules Have Changed
New federal rules on mortgage servicing can help homeowners avert disaster. But they only help if advocates know the latest. John Rao and Tara Twomey return next week with Part II of a free webinar on the new federal rules on loss mitigation for home mortgages. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued new […]
How Bankruptcy Courts Deal With Alimony and Support
The starting place for our exploration of bankruptcy and family law is support. Whether it’s called alimony, maintenance, or support, any amounts due at the commencement of a bankruptcy case are non dischargeable. Actually, since BAPCPA, it’s called a domestic support obligation. It got a statutory definition, as well: (14A) The term “domestic support obligation” means […]
