A hardship discharge is available to debtors who are not current on their post petition support payments, even though such a delinquency would prevent a regular discharge. I gathered this hitherto unknown bit from Henry Sommer in the panel on Marital Issues in Bankruptcy Saturday at the NACBA convention. BAPCPA added to the prerequisites for […]
When A Form 1099 Is Fiction
The 1099 form is so well recognized and imbued with authority that it is used by scammers to authenticate their scheme. But it’s really dangerous when genuine 1099’s are just plain wrong. And according to Bill Purdy, my go-to resource on this issue, 1099’s are often wrong. When a non recourse loan is foreclosed, no […]
The Means Test: The Clunker Allowance
As if the means test wasn’t illogical and opaque enough, consider the unwritten provision for old cars. Where do you find the unwritten allowance? It’s not in the Bankruptcy Code but in the Internal Revenue Manual at 5.8.20.3. The IRS allows a delinquent taxpayer with a paid for car more than 6 years old or […]
Know The First Rule For Bankruptcy Forms
Now retired Judge Jaroslavsky popped this question on a room full of new bankruptcy lawyers: what’s the first rule for filling out a legal form? An answer from the floor suggested “make sure you have the most recent version”, which I thought was pretty good. But the judge had something else in mind: know the […]
The Means Test: Where The Blind Lead The Sighted
The people who sit in judgment on the adequacy of your b-22 and your means test calculation have never prepared one. What other endeavor can you name where the arbiters are utterly without experience? This first came up for me when counsel for a Chapter 13 trustee recounted something I’d told him months ago ( […]
The $1000 Word
Word choice in a fee application cost a Chapter 13 lawyer $1000 yesterday. We all know about forbidden words; most of us even know some. Would you have guessed that “prepare” was one of them? I was waiting my turn in court, on a fee app no less, when the fee application of a well […]
Beware The Taxes That Follow Foreclosure
Who cares about stopping the foreclosure, it’s stopping the tax that results from foreclosure. It’s a brand new perspective for me as I counsel families with homes at risk of foreclosure. Given mortgage debt that exceeds today’s value of the property, a foreclosure will result in a 1099 for the difference between the loan balance […]
