Bankruptcy

Will My Creditors Be Angry if I (fill in the blank)?

By Joseph McDaniel, Esq.

They do, however, like primitive organisms, have responses.

When you don't pay creditors, they will, depending on the type of creditor and the stage of collections, either sue, garnish, foreclose, set up a debtor's exam, or write mean letters. And sell your debt downstream so the creditor can get a federal bailout or a bad-debt tax benefit, which is roughly the same thing.

Now, the creditor doesn't care if you have cancer, if your mother just died, or if you are unemployed. It's just not something the institution is equipped to register, like color to a blind man. It's not that the creditor institution rejoices in your sorrow; it only sees your economic profile, not the details of your life or your dreams or your aspirations.

So don't pine for the love of your creditors; you never had it, ever. When you paid your bills on time, they might have sent you a calendar at Christmas, but that didn't mean they loved you. They just sent you a calendar because that was their response to the stimulus of current payments on a 12-month cycle.

And they don't hate you; they're just sending debtors who are current one type of paper (a calendar at Christmas) and creditors who are not current a different type of paper (a lawsuit).

Creditors are a simple life-form, with limited and simple responses to stimuli. Kinda like the things you studied in high-school biology class.

So don't worry about whether they like you or hate you. They don't. They live in the eternal now and send out calendars and lawsuits with no reference to any emotion whatsoever. If they were Buddhists, they'd be very good Buddhists indeed; they act with no attachment to the fruits of their actions.

On the other hand, certain employees of creditor entities are perfectly capable of being the south end of a donkey going north.

That's what bankruptcy is for.

p.s. note that there are things that you wouldn't do anyway, because you're neither a bad person, nor dumb as a stump. But institutional creditors will be a little cranky with you if you steal from them (run up your credit cards like a fiend just prior to filing) or if you destroy their collateral for fun (smash the toilet and sink and bathtub in the house you must leave because of the foreclosure.

Don't steal from creditors, and do not intentionally destroy a creditor's collateral. Even if the institutional creditor will not be angry in the same sense that you might get angry, the institutional response will seem a lot like an angry response.

NOTHING HERE CONSTITUTES LEGAL ADVICE RE A CHAPTER 7, CHAPTER 13, CHAPTER 11, OR CHAPTER 12. FIND AN ARIZONA BANKRUPTCY LAWYER WHO IS BOARD CERTIFIED IN BANKRUPTCY LAW, AV RATED, AVVO 10 RATED, ON SUPERLAWYERS, OR JUST VERY EXPERIENCED AND A FORMER CHAIR OF SOME BANKRUPTCY SECTION OR COMMITTEE. NOTHING HERE MAY BE USED AS LEGAL ADVICE IN CONNECTION WITH ANY BANKRUPTCY, WHETHER THAT BANKRUPTCY IS IN PHOENIX, GLENDALE, TEMPE, MESA, SCOTTSDALE, OR ANYWHERE ELSE.

Full post as published by Arizona Bankruptcy Attorney Blog on January 20, 2010 (boomark / email).