Tax Debt in a Wisconsin Bankruptcy: The Three Clocks That Decide Whether It Disappears
Most debts in a bankruptcy case are sorted by what they are. A credit card is a credit card, a medical bill is a medical bill, and the law treats each the same way whether it was incurred last spring or six years ago. Tax debt is the exception. With a tax debt, the question […]
Reaffirmation Agreements in Wisconsin: The One Signature That Survives Your Bankruptcy
Most of what happens in a chapter 7 bankruptcy happens to you. The schedules get filed, the trustee asks questions, the discharge arrives in the mail, and the debts go away whether you understood the mechanism or not. There is one exception, and it is the only place in a routine consumer case where a […]
The 341 Meeting in Wisconsin: What Actually Happens, and What to Bring
The notice that arrives a week or two after you file is titled, in most people’s reading of it, a summons to court. It is not. The § 341 meeting of creditors is the one appearance a consumer bankruptcy requires of almost everybody who files, and it is also the step clients spend the most […]
The Means Test in Wisconsin: Who Actually Qualifies for Chapter 7
Almost everyone who calls about bankruptcy has heard of the means test, and almost no one has heard it described accurately. The common version is that you have to be poor enough to file Chapter 7. That is not what the statute does. The means test is not a poverty test, and it does not […]
Medical Debt in Wisconsin: What Bankruptcy Erases, and Why Your Spouse’s Hospital Bill May Be Yours
Medical debt is the debt people apologize for. Nobody chose it, nobody shopped for it, and almost nobody understood the price before they consented to the service. It arrives months after the crisis is over, in an envelope, in a number that bears no obvious relationship to anything that happened in the room. And then […]
Life After Bankruptcy in Wisconsin: Rebuilding Credit, and the Judgment Still on the Docket
The discharge order arrives in the mail, a single page, and it is almost anticlimactic. The debts are gone. What is not gone is the record of them, and the months that follow tend to produce a particular kind of frustration: the client who did everything right, who completed the case, who owes nothing, and […]
Which Debts Bankruptcy Can and Cannot Erase
Most people arrive at a bankruptcy consultation with a mental ledger already drawn up. The credit cards go. The medical bills go. The student loans, they have heard, do not. Somewhere past that the ledger gets vague, and the vagueness is where the trouble lives, because the question that decides whether filing is worth doing […]
The Automatic Stay: How Filing Bankruptcy Stops a Wisconsin Garnishment or Foreclosure
Most people who call about bankruptcy are not calling about bankruptcy. They are calling because a paycheck came in short, or because a notice of sale arrived with a date on it. The debt has been a problem for months; what is new is that someone has begun taking things. The answer to both questions […]
Will I Lose My House or My Car If I File Bankruptcy in Wisconsin?
It is the first question almost everyone asks, and usually the only one that matters to them in the opening minutes: if I file, do they take my house? Do they take my car? The fear is reasonable, it is nearly universal, and in the ordinary case it is misplaced — but not for the […]
Chapter 7 vs. Chapter 13 Bankruptcy in Wisconsin: Which One Fits Your Situation?
Most people who call a bankruptcy lawyer have already spent months trying not to. They have moved money between cards, taken the difficult phone calls, and delayed the decision until the delay itself became the problem. By the time the question is finally asked out loud — should I file, and if so, how? — […]