Free Bankruptcy - WessBkBlog

 My Online Bankruptcy Filing

For a lot of people, the decision to file bankruptcy is the end result of irresponsible money management but for others, it is the result of bad luck or the hand they are dealt in life. Many years ago, I filed bankruptcy but it was not because of financial irresponsibility. I had worked hard for years to build a decent financial future. I had a decent job in real estate and I had a wife who seemed to adore me and I knew how to handle credit responsibly. It all came crashing down when my significant other found someone else more interesting. She knew a divorce was coming so she cleaned out our bank account before I had any idea. When the divorce came, she got just about everything plus more than half of my paycheck. This was about the time the real estate market tanked. The judge figured support payments based on my past income meanwhile my real income had been cut in half by the recession. Since she was not working full-time, the judge stuck me with all the credit card debts and loans. We were supposed to sell the house and split the profit but with the depressed market, we were already upside down.

I was disappointed by how things worked out but I wasn’t going to quit so I took on a part-time job making deliveries. I had always believed that you don’t skip out on your debts so I did everything I could to not file bankruptcy. Also, I was afraid that if I filed bankruptcy, I would have to wait 10 years before I could ever buy anything again on credit. I must have held out for two years before I decided to seriously consider filing bankruptcy.

I read everything I could on bankruptcy and the more I read the more confusing I became. On the one hand there were the full-service bankruptcy companies such as USA Bankruptcy Associates saying that they were the right choice and on the other hand there were the lawyers saying that you had to use them. In the end I settled for a bankruptcy lawyer I found on Google. He advertized $500 to start so I went in for the consultation. When I told him that I needed to file quickly because I was behind on my mortgage and he try to talk me into filing chapter 13. As I said, I had read up on the different types of bankruptcies, so I knew that if I got rid of all my other debts with a chapter 7, I would be able to handle the mortgage, so I insisted on chapter 7. I paid him the $500 against a total of $1,500 and he gave me a stack of blank bankruptcy forms to fill out and bring back.

I didn’t think that I would be handed a bunch of the same forms that I hired the lawyer to fill in for me and told to fill them in so that the lawyer could retype them, but that is exactly what happened. Is that what I paid $1,500 for, I thought? Filling out the forms was confusing and required that I understood the law pertaining to each form and I did not like that. Worse yet, each time I called to ask a question, the office secretary said that he was out of the office. I could not get him to take my calls or to call me back. I decided to take the partially filled forms to the secretary for help and when I got there, lo and behold the attorney was in his office making another sale. Even though I was there in the office, he still wouldn’t talk to me. I had no choice but to deal with the secretary who was the one that actually typed the forms.

When it was time to file the forms, the lawyer said that the balance was $2,000, instead of the agreed upon $1,500, of which I had already paid $500. He denied that the deal was for $1,500 and said that $1,500 was for a simple bankruptcy with no mortgage. When I took a closer look at retainer agreement, I saw the $1,500 in bold and the, “$2,500 and up”, was in the fine print at the bottom where it is easily missed. I wanted to cancel but he wouldn’t give me the deposit back so rather than lose my deposit I gave in and paid him the $2,000 balance. Two weeks later, the bankruptcy still had not been filed and when I called his office I was told that he was out of town on any emergency. Unbeknownst to me, the bank had started foreclosure on our house but because I told them that I had a lawyer, they were sending my lawyer the foreclosure notices, not me. By the time he returned two weeks later, the bank had now charged me a foreclosure processing fee of $3,200 which I had to pay along with the back payments, in order to stop the foreclosure. Now I was really broke and pissed. Faced with this, I decided not to file bankruptcy and to let the bank take the house, but by this time, the lawyer had $2,500 of my money.

At first he wouldn’t give me my money back, insisting that I should go through with the bankruptcy. But when I would not budge, he gave me back only $1000, keeping the rest. His excuse was that he had done a lot of work advising me and preparing the bankruptcy and that according to the agreement, he was not even supposed to give me back anything. Unfortunately for me, it was all there in the fine print of the contract which I did not read. In the end he kept the money and six months later I filed with USA Bankruptcy Associates. My bankruptcy sailed smoothly and in the process I learned a lot. I was even able to discharge some secured debts while keeping the collateral because of USA Bankruptcy Associates. The lawyer never mentioned that possibility.

Surprisingly my biggest regret was not the lawyer. Rather it was that I wasted two and a half years before filing. In that time, every penny I paid on the credit cards was wasted money and every payment I made on the mortgage was for a house I did not live in.

In spite of my experience, I am sure that most bankruptcy lawyers do a good job. I just happened to have picked the wrong one. Having tried it both ways and having actually file bankruptcy, for me it is a no-brainer. You do not need a lawyer to file bankruptcy. It is all about the paperwork that you file, not about having a lawyer.