Automatic and Immediate Protection from Your Creditors
How does bankruptcy stop garnishments, foreclosures, and repossessions?
Filing a bankruptcy case gets immediate protection for you, for your paycheck, for your home, and for all your possessions. This “automatic stay” provides this kind of protection for you and your property the moment either a Chapter 7 “straight bankruptcy” case or a Chapter 13 “adjustment of debts” case is filed. Virtually all efforts by all your creditors against you or anything you own comes to an immediate stop.
“Automatic Stay” = Immediate Stop
“Stay” is simply a legal word meaning “stop” or “freeze.”
“Automatic” means that this “stay” goes into effect immediately upon the filing of your bankruptcy petition. That filing itself, according to the federal Bankruptcy Code, “operates as a stay” of virtually all creditors’ actions to pursue a debt or take possession of collateral. Since the filing of your case itself imposes the stay, there is no delay or doubt about whether a judge will sign an order to impose the “stay” against your creditors.
Creditors Need to Be Informed, Sometimes Directly
Although the protection of the “automatic stay” is imposed instantaneous, practically speaking your creditors need to be informed about the filing of your case so that they are made aware that they must comply with it. If your creditors are all listed in your bankruptcy case documents, they should all get informed by the bankruptcy court within about a week or so after your case is filed. This doesn’t take any additional action by either you or your attorney (beyond making sure all of your creditors are listed in the schedule of creditors filed at the bankruptcy court). If you have no reason to expect any action against you by any of your creditors before that, just letting them all be informed by the court is usually all that’s needed.
However, if you are expecting some action by any of your creditors quicker than a week or so after filing the case, be sure to talk with your attorney about it. That way any such creditor can be directly informed by about your bankruptcy filing to stop whatever collection action it was contemplating. Make sure you and your attorney are clear which of you is informing that creditor and in what way.
Creditor Action Taken Unexpectedly
But what if a creditor has not yet been informed of your bankruptcy filing when it takes some action against you or your property in the days after your bankruptcy filing but before it finds out about it?
If this happens, the “automatic stay” is so powerful that in most circumstances such a creditor must undo whatever action it took against you after your bankruptcy was filed, even if this creditor honestly did not yet know about your filing. For example, if after your bankruptcy is filed a creditor files a lawsuit against you or gets a judgment on a lawsuit that it had filed earlier, the creditor must dismiss (throw out) its lawsuit or vacate (erase) the judgment.