Keeping It Simple in a Closed-Business Chapter 7 Case

Using a Chapter 7 case to clean up after closing down your business will be easy or not depending largely on three factors: business assets, taxes, and other nondischargeable debts. These three will usually also determine if you should be in a Chapter 7 case or instead in a Chapter 13 one.

Once you’ve closed down your business and decided to file bankruptcy, you may have a strong gut feeling about choosing the Chapter 7 option. After what you’ve been through, you just want a fresh, clean start. If you’d put years of blood, sweat and tears into trying to get your business to succeed, and then finally had to throw in the towel after resisting doing so for so long, at this point you likely feel like it’s time to put all that behind you. The last thing you likely feel like doing is dragging things along for the next three to five years that a Chapter 13 case usually lasts.

And you may well be ABLE to file a Chapter 7 case. The “means test” largely determines whether, given your income and expenses, you can file a Chapter 7 case. In my last blog I told you that you can avoid the “means test” altogether if more than half of your debts are business debts instead of consumer debts. But even if that does not apply to you, the “means test” will still not likely stand in your way, especially if you just closed down your business recently. That’s because the period of income that counts for the “means test” is the six full calendar months before your bankruptcy case is filed. An about-to-fail business usually isn’t generating much income.

But usually the question is not whether you are able to file a Chapter 7 case, but rather whether doing so is really better for you than a Chapter 13 one.

Many factors can come into play, but the following three seem to come up all the time:

1. Business assets: There are two kinds of Chapter 7 cases: “no asset” and “asset.” In the former, the Chapter 7 trustee decides—usually quite quickly—that none of your assets (which technically belong to your “bankruptcy estate”) are worth taking and selling to pay creditors. Either all those assets are “exempt” from the reach of the trustee, or are not worth enough for the trustee to bother. But with a recently closed business, there are more likely to be assets that are not exempt and are worth the trustee’s effort to collect and liquidate. If you have such collectable business assets, you will want to discuss with your attorney where the anticipated proceeds of the Chapter 7 trustee’s sale of those assets would likely go, and whether that is in your best interest compared to what would happen to those assets in a Chapter 13 case.

2. Taxes: Just about every closed-business bankruptcy seems to involve tax debts. Although some taxes CAN be discharged in a Chapter 7 case, most cannot. Chapter 13 is often a better way to deal with taxes. This will depend on the precise kind of tax—personal income tax, employee withholding tax, sales tax—and on a series of other factors such as when the tax became due, whether a tax return was filed, if so when, and whether a tax lien was recorded.

3. Other nondischargeable debts: Bankruptcies involving former businesses seem to get more than the usual amount of creditor challenges to the discharge of debts. These challenges are usually based on allegations that the business owner acted in some fraudulent fashion against a former business partner, a business landlord. or some other major creditor.  Such litigation, often started or at least threatened before the bankruptcy is filed, can turn an otherwise simple bankruptcy case into a long and expensive battle, regardless whether your case is a Chapter 7 or 13. But depending on the nature of the anticipated allegations, Chapter 13 may give you certain legal and tactical advantages over Chapter 7.

I’ll expand on these three one at a time in my next three blogs. From them you will be able to get a much better idea whether your business bankruptcy case should be in a Chapter 7 or not, and if so whether it will likely be relatively simple or not.

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Getting a Fresh Financial Start After Closing Down Your Small Business

Closing down a business can be messy. A bankruptcy filed to deal with its financial fallout is often more complicated than a normal consumer bankruptcy case. But not necessarily.  In one respect at least, a business bankruptcy can actually be much easier than a consumer one.  

If you’ve owned a small business that you have already shut down, or are about to, you may be afraid of filing bankruptcy because you’ve heard that “business bankruptcies” are terribly expensive and not a good way to wrap up the affairs of a business. In the next few blogs I will address this concern by showing ways that bankruptcy can be a relatively simple and effective solution.

Today I start with a little twist in the “means test” that favors certain former business owners over normal consumers.

The “means test” determines whether you may file a “straight” Chapter 7 case to discharge your debts in a matter of a few months, or instead must file a 3-to-5-year Chapter 13 payment case. Unless you need some of the other benefits of Chapter 13, Chapter 7 is usually preferred because it gets you to a fresh start much more quickly and cheaply.

In many situations, a former business owner will NOT be able to pass the means test and so will be required to go through Chapter 13. For example:

  • If, after closing her business a business owner succeeded in getting a good job before filing bankruptcy, the income from that job may be higher than the “median income” applicable to her state and family size. So she may well not pass the “means test.”
  • If the business was operated by one spouse while the other continued working and earning a decent income, that other spouse’s income alone may bump the couple above their applicable “median income,” again with the result of not passing the “means test.”
  • If a debtor’s income is higher than the applicable “median income,” he may still be able to pass the means test by deducting from his income his actual and/or approved expenses. But a former business owner will not be able to deduct monthly payments to secured creditors on business collateral he is surrendering—vehicles and equipment, for example—or for other business expenses, such as rent on the former business premises. This reduces the likelihood that he will have enough allowed expenses to pass the “means test.”

But here’s the good news for some former business owners: the “means test” only applies if your “debts are primarily consumer debts.” (See Section 707(b)(1) of the Bankruptcy Code.) So if your debts are primarily business debts—more than 50%–you essentially can skip the “means test.”

Careful, because by “debts” the law means all debts, including home mortgages and personal vehicle loans. So your business debts will usually have to be quite high to be more than all your consumer debts.

And to apply this law we must be very clear about the difference between these two types of debts. So what’s a “consumer debt”? The definition may sound familiar: it’s a “debt incurred by an individual primarily for a personal, family, or household purpose.” (Section 101(8).)  So, for example, if you took out a second mortgage on your home a few years ago explicitly to fund your business, the current balance on that second mortgage would not likely be a consumer debt.

Sometimes the line between these is not clear, so this is something you need to discuss thoroughly with your attorney if you want to avoid the “means test” under this “primarily business debts” exception.

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The Morality of the American Airlines Chapter 11 Reorganization

A corporation which files bankruptcy is considered to be proactively using a strategic business tool. But a human being who files bankruptcy is considered to be irresponsibly breaking promises to creditors.  

Let’s see if this difference in attitude makes sense using the example of the bankruptcy filing of American Airlines in late November.

Selecting just a very few characteristics of the American Airlines Chapter 11 “reorganization,” here’s how they compare to a consumer Chapter 13 “adjustment of debts”:

1. Reason for filing:  As I said in my last blog, at the time of its bankruptcy filing the airline had no immediate financial reason for filing. But it had a mediation hearing scheduled in early December in its drawn-out negotiations with its pilots union. The Chapter 11 filing canceled that mediation and gives management much more leverage against its employees, especially its pilots, who would be hurt the most by American defaulting on its pensions.

In digging a little deeper since my last blog, there in fact WAS a financial deadline that the November 29 filing clearly intended to beat. American had financed an engineering and maintenance center in its Fort Worth, Texas headquarters in the early 1990s, and related to that was obligated to pay close to $50 million in unsecured municipal bonds on December 1. Those bonds lost most of their value with the bankruptcy filing. Who are the bondholders thatwho got hurt? New York Life was a major holder of these bonds, meaning that their life insurance customers were indirectly affected.

In Chapter 13, consumers similarly often file to stop some bad event from happening—a foreclosure, wage garnishment, a vehicle repossession. How would you weigh the morality of preserving a family home or vehicle or paycheck against threatening the loss of employee pensions or eating away at the value of investors’ life insurance?

2. Cash on hand:  When American Airlines filed its case, it had more than $4 billion in cash or cash-like assets, by far more than any other airline that has ever filed Chapter 11. It announced that it expects to be able to ride through the Chapter 11 case without having to borrow any more. So it filed when it was nowhere close to being financially strapped. Why did it do so, besides to gain leverage against its unions and to avoid big payments to bondholders so that it could hang onto its money longer? Because having that much money gives it more independence, so it has more leverage to dictate the terms of any potential merger.

In contrast, most consumers filing bankruptcy wait until the bitter end, when they have exhausted all their other alternatives, often when putting off filing is not in their best interest. Classic examples: using otherwise protected retirement money or borrowing from relatives. Most people delay at least in part out of a sense of moral obligation—they want to pay their creditors, don’t want to see themselves as irresponsible. So what’s more honorable, learning about your options early and then prudently filing bankruptcy when it can best serve you (and your family and your future), or instead doing everything possible to avoid filing no matter the long-term costs? Maybe consumers can learn something from business bankruptcies here, but if anything consumers seem to weigh bankruptcy decisions much more morally than businesses do.

3. Assets:  One bit of controversy that has come out of American Airlines case is a swanky piece of real estate it owns, apparently free and clear, used by its highest executives. It’s a five-story home in one of the most exclusive areas of London, worth about $30 million.  Now that amounts to only one thousandth of its $30 billion in debt, a relative drop in the bucket. But if you are trying to wrestle concessions out of your labor unions, and have a judge overseeing your operations, that kind of opulence obviously doesn’t help make your moral case.

In a consumer bankruptcy, you can protect assets that are “exempt,” but those exemptions generally cover only your bare essentials. In a Chapter 13 case you can usually also keep exempt assets that are not exempt, but you need to pay for the privilege. Businesses tend to get away with a lot more on the grounds of “business necessity.” So what’s a more moral procedure, a consumer bankruptcy which makes you account for and then either surrender or pay for any nonexempt assets, or a business bankruptcy which is not as restrictive about assets?

Business decisions, including and especially to file a bankruptcy reorganization, are moral decisions because they can hurt people. American Airlines will likely break many thousands of promises through its Chapter 11 case. Likely a large portion of those broken promises will be to employees who invested in and counted on those promises for many years. In contrast, most individuals who file bankruptcy are not directly harming other individuals. That doesn’t necessarily make it better morally, but my point is personal bankruptcies are at the very least not morally worse than business bankruptcies, even though that is how they are commonly portrayed. Both business and personal bankruptcies have a moral component. Maybe that component should be emphasized more in the former and less in the latter.

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The Simplest Save-Your-Business Chapter 13 Case

Here’s how to focus on running your business, by stopping your creditors from taking the wind out of your sails.

In the last few blogs I’ve been talking about some of the extra considerations that come into play when you own a business, are having financial troubles, and wonder if bankruptcy can help. No question—most of the time, having a business adds an extra layer of issues for me to help you work through in deciding whether bankruptcy is the best option, and then putting your case together if it is. But a business Chapter 13 case does not have to be complicated. Let’s take a very simple business situation, and walk it through a Chapter 13 case, to get a practical feel for how it works.

So let’s say Mark, a single 30-year old, started a handyman business when he lost his job three years ago. Before that he’d done about ten years of all kinds of construction and maintenance work, already owned all the tools he needed, and had even taken a few courses at the local community college in small business management because he’d always wanted to run his own business. He had good credit at the time, owed nothing but about $3,000 on some credit cards, plus had never been late on his modest mortgage. Mark had lived all his life in the same city, was the kind of guy who knew tons of people, and had well-earned reputation that he could fix anything. He put a lot of time into putting together a detailed and realistic business plan. He knew he should have some money saved up to get him past the start-up phase, but then the recession hit, he was out of work, and decided it was now or never. Besides, he had $7,000 of credit available on his credit cards if he got desperate.

His business started off slowly, partly because he didn’t have any money for advertizing. But he was creative and worked very hard building a customer base and a good business reputation. His income was creeping steadily upwards, but way too slowly. Over the course of the first year Mark maxed out his credit cards, and simply didn’t have enough money to pay income taxes to the IRS, falling behind $7,000 to them. Then during the second year he managed to service the credit card debt but couldn’t pay it down any, and fell behind another $7,000 to Uncle Sam. Then this last year, the IRS forced him to start making $500 monthly payments on his $14,000 debt, plus the estimated payments for the current year so that he didn’t continue falling further behind with them. As a result he’d gotten spotty on his credit card payments, which jacked up the interest rates and pushed him over the credit limits, piling on all kinds of fees. And now he’s missed a total of 4 payments on his mortgage, putting him $6,000 in arrears.

In the midst of all this his business now has steady—and still slowly increasing—income, Mark enjoys his work in spite of all the financial pressures, and believes he can keep growing it, especially if/when the economy improves. But the IRS has him in a vice, the credit cards creditors are sending their accounts to collection agencies, and his home is heading sooner or later to foreclosure.

A Chapter 13 case filed now for Mark would:

  • Stop the pressure by the IRS on the $14,000 debt, by cancelling the $500 payments, and giving him much longer—3-to-5 years—to pay that debt, usually with NO additional ongoing interest or “failure to pay” penalties, thus reducing the total amount to be paid to the IRS.
  • Stop collection efforts by the credit card creditors and collection agencies, who would only receive money AFTER he caught up on the house arrearage AND paid off all the taxes, with the amount received depending on what Mark could afford and how much in assets he needed to protect.
  • Immediately and consistently protect all his business and personal assets—tools and supplies, his business truck and/or personal vehicle, receivables owed by customers for prior work, and his business and personal bank and/or credit union accounts.
  • Allow him to focus on his business instead of his creditors, giving that business much more of a chance at success.
  • Get him debt-free–at the end of the 3-to-5 years Chapter 13 Plan, his mortgage would be current, he would owe nothing more to Uncle Sam, and he would have paid as much as he could afford on the credit cards, with the rest written off.

And the business that he loves, and in which he invested so much hope and dedication, would be alive and well.

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Basic Rules about Business Bankruptcy

If your business needs bankruptcy help, getting it done might not be much harder than a personal bankruptcy. But it depends on how your business is set up and how much you owe.

A couple blogs ago I said that I would soon explain some of the most important benefits of filing a business Chapter 13 case. And I said we’d start by assuming that your business is a sole proprietorship. In other words, the business and you are together legally as a single entity. That is, you have NOT set up your business as a separate legal entity–a corporation or limited liability company (LLC), or a formal or informal partnership.

But first, what if your business IS NOT a simple sole proprietorship, but instead is in one of these other forms?

If so, and you want to preserve your business through some kind of bankruptcy solution, I’ve got no choice but to start by telling you that it’s time (probably past the time) to have a meeting with a competent business bankruptcy attorney.  There are advantages and disadvantages of every form of doing business. But one practical disadvantage of running your business as a corporation/LLC/partnership is that this tends to make things significantly more complicated in the bankruptcy world.

That being said, here are a few straightforward things I can tell you that will make you just a bit more prepared when you visit me or another attorney:

1. Only an “individual” can file Chapter 13. Meaning that you and your sole proprietorship can together file a Chapter 13. But a corporation, or LLC, or partnership can’t.

2. Chapter 13s are sometimes called “wage-earner plans,” probably because one legal requirement is that you have a “regular income.” But that just means “income sufficiently stable and regular to… make payments under a plan under Chapter 13.” So if your sole proprietorship business income—combined with any other income—is even somewhat stable, you may well qualify under this requirement.

3.  But even if your business IS a sole proprietorship, you and your business together CAN’T file a Chapter 13 case if your total unsecured debt is $360,475 or more, or your total secured debt is $1,010,650 or more. These may seem like relatively high amounts but remember they include BOTH personal and business debts. Also the unsecured debt amounts can include less obvious ones such as the portions of your mortgages and other secured debts in excess of the value of the collateral. So a $750,000 debt secured by real estate now worth $550,000 equates to $200,000 in unsecured debt. And that’s before even looking at your regular unsecured debts.

4. If you are over one of the above debt limits, you can still file a Chapter 7 case, but that is almost never a way to save a business. Otherwise, your option is a Chapter 11, which is a hugely more complicated repayment procedure than Chapter 13.

5. A business corporation, LLC, or partnership can file a Chapter 11 case to keep the business afloat. But because of the very high attorney fees (easily 10 times the cost of a Chapter 13), and high filing fee plus ongoing court and U.S. Trustee fees, Chapter 11 is unfortunately not a practical solution for most small businesses. One of the biggest shortcomings in the bankruptcy world is the lack of a cost-effective method to deal with small business reorganizations. Many local bankruptcy courts have tried to address this with streamlined “fast-track” Chapter 11s, but the cost is often still prohibitively high.

As I said, if you are trying to save your financially struggling business, it is very important that you get competent business bankruptcy advice, and as soon as possible. You have likely been working extremely hard at trying to keep your business alive. Now you need a game plan to start directing your energies in a constructive direction.

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Can an Individual Chapter 7 Case Ever Save Your Business?

Chapter 13 can be a great way to keep certain small businesses afloat, but how about Chapter 7? Can’t it ever be a simpler and cheaper way to do so?

In my last blog I said that Chapter 7 is “seldom the right option if you own a business that you want to keep operating.”  The reason I gave for this is that Chapter 7 is a “liquidating bankruptcy,” so the bankruptcy trustee could make you surrender any valuable components of your business. These comments deserve more of an explanation.

At the moment a Chapter 7 bankruptcy is filed, all of the assets of the debtor (the person on whose behalf the case is filed) are automatically transferred to a new legal entity called the bankruptcy “estate.” A trustee is assigned to oversee this estate, which in most cases means that the trustee focuses on whether or not there are any estate assets worth collecting and distributing to creditors. The debtor can protect, or “exempt,” certain categories and amounts of assets, which remain the debtor’s and can’t be taken by the trustee. The idea is that people filing bankruptcy should be allowed to keep a minimum threshold of assets upon which to base their fresh financial start. In the vast majority of consumer Chapter 7 cases, the debtor can “exempt from property of the estate” all of the assets, leaving nothing for the trustee to collect.  This is called a “no-asset” estate.

If you own a business, can you file a Chapter 7 case and still continue operating the business?  That breaks down into two questions.

The first question is whether you can exempt all of the value of the business from the property of the bankruptcy estate, with the business either as a “going concern” or broken up into its asset components.

Many very small businesses are operated by and are completely reliant for their survival on the services of its one or two owners.  IF so, they cannot be sold as a “going concern”—an operating business—separate from their owners. So when faced with this kind of situation, a Chapter 7 trustee must consider whether he or she can sell any of the various assets that make up the business, or whether instead the debtor can exempt all of these business assets.

The assets of a very small business can include tools and equipment, receivables (money owed by customers for goods or services previously provided), supplies, inventory, and cash on hand or in an account. Sometimes the business will have some value in a brand name or trademark, a below-market lease, or in some other unusual asset.  

Whether a business’ assets are exempt depends on the nature and value of those assets, and on the particular exemptions that apply to them. By way of examples, it is not unusual for a small business to own nothing more than a modest amount of business equipment, and in such cases the applicable state or federal “tool of trade” exemption may well cover all that equipment. So indeed, it is possible for a debtor who owns a business to have a no-asset Chapter 7 estate.

But that’s when we get to the second question: is the trustee willing to let the business continue operating in spite of its potential liability risks for the estate?

What’s this about “liability risks”? Remember that everything you own, including your business, immediately becomes part of the bankruptcy estate when your bankruptcy case is file. So in effect, your business becomes the trustee’s to operate. And that means that the estate becomes potentially liable for damages caused by the business. The classic example: a debtor who is a residential roofing subcontractor, drops a load of shingles on someone the day after filing a Chapter 7 case, and is then sued by the injured party. The bankruptcy estate, and arguably the trustee, may well be liable. That is why the Chapter 7 trustees’ mantra about an ongoing business is “shut it down.”

There may be exceptions. It depends on the trustee, the nature of the business, and whether the business has sufficient liability insurance. It is their judgment call, and so this is very much area where you want to be represented by an attorney who knows all of the trustees on the local Chapter 7 trustee panel and how they will respond to this issue.

 So, there’s no question that it is risky to file a Chapter 7 case when you want to continue operating a business. You need to be confident that the business assets are exempt from the bankruptcy estate, and that the trustee will not require the closing of the business to avoid any potential business liability.

And that’s without even getting into details such as your potential loss of control of the business to the trustee, and the potential loss of business’ ongoing income to the estate.

I might well have not stated it strongly enough when I said that Chapter 7 is “seldom the right option if you own a business that you want to keep operating.”  It would take a rare set of circumstances for Chapter 7 to be the best way to go.

 

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Bankruptcy Can Save Your Business

Bankruptcy isn’t just for cleaning up after the death of a business. It can keep your business alive.

Bankruptcy saved General Motors. That business got out of a lot of it debt and restructured its operations, and ended up saving a lot of jobs. If you operate your own small business, bankruptcy may be able to save your job, too.

Let’s assume you have a very small, very simple business. One so simple that you did not form a corporation or any other kind of legal entity when you set up the business. And to keep this blog simple, assume you don’t have any partners.  You own and operate your business by yourself for yourself, in what the law calls a sole proprietorship.

There are advantages and disadvantages of operating your business this way. For better or worse you and your business are legally treated pretty much as a single unit—unlike a corporation which owns its own assets and has its own debts distinct from the owner(s). In the right circumstances, a sole proprietorship is a much easier type of business to deal with in a bankruptcy.

Chapter 7, “straight bankruptcy,” is seldom the right option if you own a business that you want to keep operating during and after the bankruptcy. Chapter 7 is also called “liquidating bankruptcy.” You can write off (“discharge”) your debts in return for liquidation—the surrender of your assets to the trustee to sell and distribute to your creditors. Except that in most Chapter 7 cases everything you own is protected–“exempt”—so that you lose nothing or very little. But if you own an ongoing business, although some of the assets of an ongoing business may be exempt, usually not all of them are.  So the Chapter 13 trustee could require you to give crucial parts of your business to him or her to liquidate.

Instead, a Chapter 13 case—ironically sometimes misnamed a “wage-earner plan”—is much better designed to enable you keep your personal and business assets. You get immediate relief from your creditors, and for a much longer period of time, usually along with a significant reduction in the amount of debt to be repaid.  So Chapter 13 helps both your immediate cash flow and the business’ long-term prospects. It is also an excellent way to address tax debts, often a major issue for struggling businesses. Overall, it is a relatively inexpensive tool that combines the discipline of a court-approved plan of payments to creditors with the flexibility of allowing you to continue operating your business.

In the next few blogs I’ll explain some of the most important benefits of filing a business Chapter 13 case. But in the meantime, please understand that when you own ANY kind of business, solving your financial problems will be more complicated.  Sometimes only a little more complicated, other times much more so. Because we’re not just dealing with the size and timing of a paycheck, but rather with all the financial and practical aspects of running a business. Plus, issues of timing are often important in business bankruptcy cases, requiring more pre-bankruptcy planning to chart the best path for you. So, no matter how small your business, be sure to get competent legal advice, and do so as soon as possible. You have a lot at stake.

 

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