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We Just Want It All to be Over! Is This Bankruptcy Ever Going to be Done? Well, No! Not for a While!

By Joseph McDaniel, Esq.

Has anybody had a baby? Natural childbirth, maybe?

After the Lamaze Classes, my wife looked forward to the delivery, and the beauty and wonder of the birth experience.

That was before the contractions hit.

After a few hours of contractions, she suggested that the process was substantially less fun than she had expected. 

After several more hours, she opined mildly that she wasn't entirely happy, and that she might be a good deal happier when the entire process was over. Maybe.

Now that we have the means test, I have a couple of cases, and a couple of clients, with similar feelings.

And I understand. I can't make the pain entirely go away, any more than I could mitigate the contractions with clever conversation. 

See, nobody really wants to file a Chapter 13 Bankruptcy Case, if they're in their right minds and know the difference between a Chapter 7 and a Chapter 13, which is the difference between painful and agonizing. That's why about 83% of bankruptcy cases in Arizona are filed under Chapter 7, if my memory is correct.

But it may take months after the job is lost before a client can qualify for a Chapter 7; and since they lost the job, that means they also don't qualify for a Chapter 13, because of the regular income requirement (if they were crazy enough to want a Chapter 13).

That means a period of time twiddling thumbs and worrying about the unknown.

Which is less fun than you might think. Especially the twiddling.

p.s. as frequent readers know, a fast, no-asset bankruptcy case will be open for administrative purposes for a year or so. A case with assets (eight hundred dollars to a thousand dollars worth of non-exempt assets for the trustee to administer) may be open for three or four years, although most of the involvement of the debtors in a Chapter 7 Case is over within 100 days of filing, in an ordinary case.

Full post as published by Arizona Bankruptcy Attorney Blog on November 04, 2010 (boomark / email).