Advantages of Bankruptcy

The most important legal benefit to bankruptcy is the discharge of debts, which allows you, the debtor, to start over with a clean slate. However, there are many more advantages of bankruptcy including protecting future income and stopping collection agencies.

Advantages of Bankruptcy: Breathing and Sleeping Easier

Whether you can’t fall asleep at night or wake up in the middle of the night stressed and worried about your debts, the goal of a bankruptcy is to let you start breathing and sleeping easier. A bankruptcy is a way to deal with your finances and realize that there is a simple straight forward path out of the hole in which you may feel like you are stuck .

Advantages of Bankruptcy: Discharger of Most Debts 

The goal of most bankruptcy cases is to have most of the unsecured debts discharged.  This discharge eliminates any personal obligation to pay many types of debts.  There are a few debts that are not dischargeable.  If a creditor has a secured debt, the debt owed to that lien will have to be dealt with either during the bankruptcy in a chapter 13 or after the bankruptcy in a chapter 7 because the lien will survive the case.  For most debtors, bankruptcy (especially a Chapter 7 bankruptcy) is a relatively quick and easy way to end creditor collection efforts, harassment, anxiety, lack of sleep, and marital stress normally associated with debt overload.

Advantages of Bankruptcy: Protection of Property and Future Income

Bankruptcy is often the only sure way to protect your property from  unsecured creditors (those who did not take a lien on property as collateral at  the time of the transaction). Bankruptcy may provide total protection for a home, car, or other vital property.  The amount of property that debtors can protect from creditors through  exemptions in bankruptcy is, in many states, far greater than the amount that  they can protect under the state law execution processes through which  creditors attempt to seize debtors’ property or income. In addition, the bankruptcy discharge stops a creditor who has sued from being able to go forward on its judgment, therefore protecting your property from collection.

In addition, if you have any garnishments of wages or income or attempts to claim money from a bank account or other deposit account, these collection efforts may be stopped by the bankruptcy and protect your future income and earnings from being continually and perpetually available for collection from the majority of your creditors.

Advantages of Bankruptcy: Tools for Eliminating or Modifying Secured Debts

A bankruptcy discharge does not, by itself, eliminate the liens on a debtor’s  property that secured creditors have obtained before bankruptcy. However, the laws do give you ways to deal with most  secured creditors. Many types of liens may be eliminated or reduced, either  because they impair exemptions or because they are on property that is worth less than the liens. In a Chapter 13 case, payments on most other secured debts can  be lowered, and a reasonable time can be gained to cure almost any defaulted  secured debt. Often, one or more of these aspects of bankruptcy enable a debtor to retain a home, car or furniture that would otherwise be lost.

Advantages of Bankruptcy: Automatic Stay

One of the most important and valuable advantages of bankruptcy law is the automatic stay, which typically goes into effect at the moment of filing bankruptcy, whether or not the creditor knows of the bankruptcy.  The automatic stay is an  automatic provision in the Bankruptcy Code that prohibits all sorts of collection attempts by  creditors, allowing the bankruptcy to proceed in an orderly fashion. It forces an immediate stop of most creditor actions against the debtor, including  repossessions, garnishments or attachments, utility shutoffs, foreclosures, and  evictions. Many of these can thereafter be permanently prevented. The stay is  also an effective way to end creditor collection  efforts as they are no longer allowed to continue to call or otherwise contact you. Creditors who violate the stay risk contempt of court, money damages  and attorneys’ fees. Beyond all this, the stay gives the debtor a breathing spell, time to sort things out.

Advantages of Bankruptcy: Other Protections

Bankruptcy may offer the only possible way for an individual to keep or regain  a driver’s license that is subject to revocation because of an unpaid debt  arising from a motor vehicle accident. This, in turn, may mean employment and  income for the individual’s family. In some cases, bankruptcy may mean freedom for a debtor who might otherwise be incarcerated for failure to pay support obligations or as a result of a contempt proceeding involving some other debt.  The Bankruptcy Code also protects the debtor from many types of discriminatory actions by government bodies and private employers on the basis of unpaid debts discharged in bankruptcy.