Today I want to answer the question, “I have a security interest in property that somebody is using, or I loaned somebody some property and they haven’t given it back to me. How do I get possession of that property from the person who’s wrongfully withholding it?”

Well, the answer to that question is there’s a procedure in the law called replevin, and replevin is a fairly short procedure in most states because these are things where stuff disappears, and the people that want to get their stuff back or get their collateral back so they can sell it, tends to have a problem getting hold of that, so they don’t want them to hang around too long in the court process. It’s a fairly quick procedure that allows you to go into Maryland District Court and obtain an order or judgment giving you possession of your stuff.

Once you have that order or judgment, then you send the sheriff out to identify it and to grab it and to bring it back into someplace for storage or safekeeping so that you can then sell it to pay down your debt, or if it’s yours and the other person was holding it, simply enjoy whatever use and possession that you want once you have it back in your possession.

The post What is Replevin? appeared first on Baltimore Bankruptcy Lawyer.

Today I want to answer the question, you know, I have a payment that I’m making from an auto debit from the bank, and I need to stop that payment. How do I do that?

Well, you know, sometimes that seems like it’s going to be tricky or frustrating, but it should be pretty simple. First, go to the bank. Tell the bank you don’t want that payment coming out of your bank account anymore. The bank really should honor that request and then withdraw that ACH, or let’s say you have it coming out from a debit card. You could go to your debit card company and say, you know what, I have this automatic payment coming out and I need to stop it.

So, that’s the first thing I would do, is go to your financial institution. The next is go to your creditor. Tell the creditor, listen, I need to stop the auto debits that are coming out, so I’m withdrawing the authorization that I gave you to take these auto debits. The creditor really does need to honor that because the creditor can’t just take money from you without your authorization.

If you’re making no headway in trying to get free of this payment, you may have the last resort which is simply pull all the money out of that account and start putting money into a new account. It could be at the same bank, it could be at a different bank. This way when the auto debit comes out of that old account, it will fail, and the creditor won’t be happy, but at least you won’t have that money coming out of your account on a regular basis. The good news is these days, it’s pretty easy to change if you have your Social Security check or disability check or your payroll check going into a bank account every month or every other week or however, but every period of time that you get your pay, it’s pretty easy and pretty quick to have that changed to a new system.

The post How Do I Stop Auto Payments? appeared first on Baltimore Bankruptcy Lawyer.

“I’m running my business out of my wife’s name, and so nothing is in my own name in the business. Will that be safe in bankruptcy?”

That’s a tricky question because what you’re doing could be construed as being fraudulent. If your wife doesn’t have a significant stake in the business, if she’s not actively involved in running the business, if she’s not involved in the risk involved in managing the business, then it’s going to look like what you’re doing is hiding behind your wife, and that her ownership of that property is a sham.

Under those circumstances that entire transaction be considered a fraudulent conveyance that a trustee could sue in bankruptcy court to undo, and move the entire business organization into your name, and therefore sell it and realize some cash to pay creditors. That’s why if you’re going to run a business out of your spouse’s name, it’s very important that your spouse have an active and meaningful role in that business.

The post Can I Get In Trouble Running My Business In My Wife’s Name? appeared first on Baltimore Bankruptcy Lawyer.

“I just got divorced, I live in Maryland, and suddenly I have liens against my home. What happened?”

While you were married, if you held property jointly with your spouse, that property was protected against claims against either you or claims against your spouse.

So, those claims sort of bounced off the property that’s held jointly. That’s called holding property as tenants by the entirety. Only married people can hold property in that way. If there’s judgments against you, or judgments against your spouse, the instant you get divorced those judgments will become liens against your interest in the property that is no longer protected by that special way of holding property.

That’s why it’s very important to plan your bankruptcy and your divorce depending upon whether or not your creditors have judgments against you.

The post Why Does My Home Have Liens After My Divorce? appeared first on Baltimore Bankruptcy Lawyer.

“I have a lawsuit against somebody that I forgot to list in my schedules when I filed Chapter 7, and now my case was discharged and closed. But I want to pursue this litigation. Is this okay?”

Well, the answer to that question is yes. You probably do have a problem, because when your Chapter 7 trustee considered whether you have assets for the benefit of creditors by looking at the schedules that you signed under oath you didn’t include that lawsuit, which might be a valuable asset that the trustee would want to take up and prosecute and carry through to judgment or to settlement.

But what happened is the trustee didn’t even know that that lawsuit existed. So you got a discharge and you probably got a no distribution report in your case saying that there were no assets based upon premises that really weren’t true. What can happen is after you file your new lawsuit post bankruptcy discharge your defendant might say you didn’t list this lawsuit in yout bankruptcy schedules and therefore you should be estopped from bringing it now, because it was if you said there was no lawsuit because you didn’t schedule it in your bankruptcy papers which are filed under penalty of perjury and are supposed to be complete and accurate.

So what you really need to do in that situation is petition the court to reopen your bankruptcy case, refile your bankruptcy schedules to include the lawsuit, have the trustee consider whether the lawsuit has any value, and if not, the trustee may just go through that process all over again abandon the lawsuit, close the bankruptcy case, and then you can proceed with your lawsuit.

The post Can I Collect On A Lawsuit If I Didn’t List It In My Bankruptcy Schedules? appeared first on Baltimore Bankruptcy Lawyer.

“My wages are being garnished but they’re taking after tax income. Does that mean that I can deduct from my income what’s being seized by the garnishing creditor?”

Unfortunately, the answer to that questions is no. Because it’s after tax income, that income is net of what you already had deducted from your paycheck. So, you’ve already paid taxes on your salary or your wages and now the garnishment is coming out of your after tax income. That’s one of the reasons why garnished wages are so debilitating and so difficult to overcome.

The post Can I Deduct Garnished Money From My Taxes? appeared first on Baltimore Bankruptcy Lawyer.

“I’m trying to get a short sale through or some other relief from the bank but I just can’t get them to pay attention to me. Is there anything that I can do in bankruptcy?”

Frequently the answer to that question is yes, there are some things you can do. You can, for example, file a motion in Chapter 13 to sell your property free and clear of the bank’s lien and security interest to your proposed buyer. That’s a very powerful feature that you have in a bankruptcy case.

If you want to do that, you have to file a motion for approval of that sale and then serve the bank or the other secured creditor really by regular mail. Then there will be a court date and the judge is going to consider whether you satisfy the requirements for selling this property. If the bank doesn’t answer, the court has the ability to approve your short sale even though the bank hasn’t answered or otherwise appeared in the case.

So frequently banks do appear because they don’t want to lose their rights, and that’s when you’ll get a chance to have a meaningful discussion with them because they’ll have to go through the trouble of hiring a lawyer and defending themselves in the bankruptcy.

The post Can I Use Bankruptcy To Get The Bank’s Attention For A Short Sale? appeared first on Baltimore Bankruptcy Lawyer.

“I got sued and there’s somebody else that got sued with me and they say we have joint and several liability. What is that?”

Joint and several liability is a phrase under the law that says the creditor who’s got a judgment against you and your co debtor can collect part of it from you and your co debtor or all of it from you or all it from your co debtor. They aren’t stuck getting half of it from you and half of it from your co debtor, and that’s a really important issue under the law, and it becomes especially important when you and your co debtor are spouses and you have property that’s held jointly as tenants by the entirety.

That means that this creditor can reach tenants by the entirety property in bankruptcy or outside of bankruptcy and so that property is at risk, and when you’re considering bankruptcy filing you need to consider that and you need to plan to determine the right strategy for you and your spouse and your jointly held property.

The post What Does Joint And Several Liability Mean? appeared first on Baltimore Bankruptcy Lawyer.

Your’re going to be filing a bankruptcy case, but you know that there’s a credit counseling obligation. Can you just file the case and then do it right away afterwards?

The answer to that question is certainly no. You’ve got to do your credit counseling before you file the case. Almost universally cases are dismissed when the bankruptcy judge has a chance to look at the timing and sees on the certificate of credit counseling that the credit counseling was completed after the filing of the bankruptcy. What happens then is the case will be dismissed and you’ve got to file a new case and pay a new filing fee, and sometimes you lose rights with the automatic stay.

This is because when you file a second case within a year you only get the automatic stay for 30 days and then you have to run into court and ask for permission to extend the automatic stay beyond that 30 day period. So not doing your credit counseling beforehand can be a big “gotcha” for debtors.

The good news is credit counseling is very easy to accomplish. It’s not expensive and it usually takes about an hour and you do it online, and there are dozens if not hundreds of authorized credit counseling providers that you can choose from to get it done.

The post Can I Do My Bankruptcy Credit Counseling After Filing My Case? appeared first on Baltimore Bankruptcy Lawyer.

“I owe a lot of taxes. Should I pay that tax bill with my credit card?”

If you’re considering bankruptcy at some point down the road, the answer is definitely no, don’t do that.

There’s a specific exception to the Chapter 7 discharge that says you cannot discharge credit card debts that were incurred to pay non-dischargeable tax debts. It’s like you’re swapping out one kind of tax debt for another. The bankruptcy code considers that to be unfair.

An interesting twist on this is that if you file a Chapter 13 case, you can discharge those credit card debts as long as you pay over all of your net disposable income over the 60-month term of the Chapter 13 plan.

One of the reasons why you don’t want to use your credit cards to pay your tax debt is because delinquent taxes may have a 6 or 7 percent interest rate and there might be penalties that you have to pay, but if you can’t pay your credit card bills timely you’re going to be paying 18 percent, 25 percent as high as 29 percent on your credit bills and you’re not going to be able to discharge them in Chapter 7. So it’s just not a good financial move for you to make.

The post Don’t Pay Your Taxes With Your Credit Card! appeared first on Baltimore Bankruptcy Lawyer.