Studend Loan & bankruptcy?

[joeparker]

Hello, My name is Joe from Texas.

Background: I still owe more then 8K plus in Student loan and 25K on Credit Card debt, Medical bills, dental bills, total around 45K. I don't own a house (any property) and I still owe 6k on the car.

Current situation: I have a full time Job thanks God.
I think Ch7 is probably the only option for me because I know I won't be able to pay back what I owe. I tried to work with my creditor but you know how credit card companies are they don't care if you don't have anything to eat they want their money. Anyway, I haven't paid a single penny to any credit card companies since July 2004. I was getting around 25-30+ calls a day mostly collection companies until I disconnected my phone. Now they are calling my relatives, my landlord, my employer to get information about me.

For my student loan I applied for forbearance for 8 months but recently I got a call at work from NLNET to start paying back the loan.

I am doing research and trying to preparing paper work for Ch7.
My neighbor is paralegal he is going to help me prepare the paper work, at some point I do want to get a Lawyer involve. [Lawyer fee $$$$ ]

NO SAVING ACCOUNT, Only one checking account with 500 dollars in it.

Questions:

Do I have to pay Student load back?

I haven’t field Tax return for 2004, should I get an extension and file as prebankrupcy?

 

[giggle50]

Get serious. Forget the neighbor. Get a texas bankruptcy lawyer to help you.

Bankruptcy is so hypertechnical and the new bankruptcy law is going to make things even more difficult for honest debtors like yourself.

Most bankruptcy lawyers offer free consults and chapter 7 bankruptcy can be filed in some cases for under $500.00.

As far as your student loan, you're going to have a tough time with student loan debt discharge. The law has changed regarding student loans and discharges and your only real hope is having the loan discharged as a "hardship". You and your paralegal neighbor will never be able to this on your own. Sorry, it's the truth.

 

[toughluck73]

Texas Bankruptcy

You won’t be able to get the student loans discharged. I would forget about that.

As for your credit cards, if you haven’t made any large purchases recently, then that wouldn’t be a problem. Lawyers I have talked to (here in Texas) seem to all agree that a year without any large purchases is a good amount of time to put between your last charge and your bankruptcy. Of course this all depends on the type of charges and amounts charged. But if you made any luxury purchases you might want to wait just a little longer, until July 2005.

As for filing yourself, I would advise you not to do that. No matter how much research you do, you still don’t know many of the details that go into a bankruptcy. I can give you an example. When calculating the equity of your vehicle many people on this board say to use the Blue Book or Black Book price. As I discussed this with my attorney, he totally objected to this (was told to use NADA and take average of the trade in and retail appraisals). Different trustees in different places do things differently. Some of the trustees in my area see this as underestimating your assets. Texas is known as a debtor friendly state and allows for a generous exemption, and many of the trustees see this as underestimating your equity on top of a generous exemption. Only a lawyer could give you this type of advice. Additionally, if one of your credit card creditors objects to the bankruptcy, you will have someone to defend you. Many lawyers will not help you in this case unless you use their services to file bankruptcy in the first place.

Best advice I can give you is to file your income tax and use it to pay lawyer’s fees. If you don’t file it, they will tell you to file it or use an estimate of how much you will receive. Depending on the amount of the income tax and the amount of assets you claim, you may lose it anyways, and they could ask you to turn it over.

Anyways, I hope this helped a little and good luck.