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Final Reasons to Get Legal Advice Before Deciding to Sell Your Home

Bankruptcy gives you a wide range of tools that can help you keep your home or sell it on your own schedule. Many of these tools provide surprising advantages for you. Especially when it comes to your home, know your options before you make decisions.

This is the last of a series of three blogs covering ten reasons why you should get advice from a bankruptcy attorney before selling your home. Here are the final four of those reasons.

1.  Want to Pay off Ex-Spouse: After going through a divorce, you are often required to sell the marital home to pay off your ex-spouse. In most circumstances, debts that you owe from a divorce are not written off by a bankruptcy. But sometimes they are. And even with debts that are not written off, bankruptcy can affect the timing of payment or favor you in other ways. Divorce is often such a traumatic process. Even if during the divorce you received advice about how a possible future bankruptcy filing would affect the terms of your divorce, understandably you may not remember that advice. And frankly, many divorce attorneys do not understand bankruptcy enough to give thorough advice about it. You do not want to base decisions about your home without advice about your options, or, often worse, with incomplete advice. So now, before you sell your home to pay off your ex-spouse, get that advice, from a competent bankruptcy attorney.

2.  Need to Pay off Property Taxes, Homeowners’ Association Dues: Creditors with the strongest rights against you and your home include your county or similar governmental entity which collects your property taxes, and your homeowners’ association. So you may feel powerless in dealing with them if you fall behind on paying them, especially if they are threatening to foreclose on your home. Bankruptcy can give you a leg up on fighting them, and so find out about this before you are pushed into selling your home to pay them off.

3.  Selling to Avoid a Foreclosure: You’ve likely heard that the filing of a bankruptcy stops a foreclosure. And you probably know that Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 each deal with foreclosures differently. The truth is that every homeowner who is facing a foreclosure has a unique set of circumstances, and requires and deserves an individual analysis. Bankruptcy gives you many different combinations for addressing the issues you’re facing. Only by being informed about and thoroughly understanding those options can you make the right choices about whether and when to sell your home, and how all these fit into your whole financial picture.

4.  Can’t Afford an Attorney: If you’re selling your home because you believe it’s the best way to deal with your debts, and you can’t afford to pay an attorney to get legal advice about that decision, consider the following. A decision about your home is likely about your biggest asset and your biggest debts. I assume you agree that if you could get solid, practical advice about that, you would do so. Since I do not charge for my initial consultation, I can give you that advice. Let me help you create the best possible game plan for dealing with your home.

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Creditor Collections NOT Stopped by a Bankruptcy Filing

You can’t count that filing a bankruptcy will instantaneously stop every act against you by every one of your creditors. Or can you?

Isn’t one of the most important benefits of filing bankruptcy the fact that it puts a screeching halt to all collection efforts of your creditors against you and your property? Yes, and in fact in many cases it does exactly that. This benefit of filing bankruptcy is called the “automatic stay,” because at the moment of the filing of your case a legal injunction automatically goes into effect “staying,” or stopping, most actions by creditors against you. But exactly because the automatic stay is something we count on so much, we better know its exceptions.

Today I’m just going to list some of the most important exceptions. Then in the next couple blogs I will explain in practical terms these and other important aspects of the automatic stay.

So creditors CAN do the following in spite of your bankruptcy filing:

1) A district attorney or other governmental authority can begin or continue a criminal case against you, such as an indictment, a criminal trial, or a sentencing hearing. This includes not just felonies and misdemeanors, but also lesser matters like traffic infractions that you might not think of as “criminal.”

2) Your ex-spouse, or about-to-be ex-spouse, or somebody on his or her behalf, can start or continue a variety of divorce and family court proceedings. These include legal procedures to establish paternity of a child, determine or change the amount of child or spousal support to be paid, settle child custody or visitation issues, address domestic violence disputes, and even dissolve the marriage. (Although a marriage dissolution usually cannot include a determination about how assets or debts would be divided between the spouses.)

3) Specifically about child or spousal support, the person owed ongoing support can continue collecting it. If there is back support owed, then in spite of a Chapter 7 filing, the person who is owed the support can in most cases start or continue collecting it. This includes not only collection through wage withholdings and garnishment of bank accounts, but also through seizure of a tax refund and suspension of a driver’s license, an occupational or professional license, or even a hunting or other recreational license. In contrast, a Chapter 13 filing can stop these aggressive methods of collecting back support.

4) Taxing authorities can start or finish a tax audit, can send you a notice that you owe taxes, can demand you to file your tax returns, can assess your taxes and demand you to pay them, and in some situations can even file tax liens against you and your property.

Notice that each of these exceptions involves a special kind of creditor. As I said, the automatic stay stops actions against you by most creditors. But if you are involved in a court proceeding or collection efforts by the criminal or taxing authorities, or by an ex-spouse, be especially aware of these exceptions.

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