It is absolutely normal to get nervous just prior to filing your bankruptcy; don't let it disturb you at all. I've had 30 years of watching folks who have pre-filing jitters, some much more than others.
Do a little more exercise; take the dog for a walk. Cook some hotdogs on the grill out back; when you burn your finger on the grill, it'll take your mind off the filing!
The steps just prior to filing a Chapter 7 bankruptcy case in Arizona are pretty simple. You need to review the final draft, and if there are errors, you'll email my paralegal and let her know about them, and she'll correct them.
Some issues are more important than others. If you just remembered that you own a small nation-state, and you didn't list it, you have my permission to come unglued, because I'll fire you as a client and be unkind to you all in the same sentence.
If an account number or zip code is off by a digit, email my paralegal and she'll correct that.
There's also the issue of spending your paycheck just prior to filing.
You get your paycheck sometime; a couple never gets both paychecks on the same day, because that would make it too easy. And we usually agonize over the perfect day to file to optimize the result for a client, but it's also impossible to find the perfect day, partly because the date is often forced by a pending trustee's sale or some other external factor.
The exemption for money in Arizona is a miserly $150 per person, so when you get your $3,000 paycheck, you'll probably want to consider, after consulting with your bankruptcy lawyer, paying for your mortgage with a cashier's check, and using a debit card to buy groceries and prescription drugs and vitamins and minerals and soap and deodorant, because in Arizona there is an exemption for six months worth of food, fuel and provisions (and no, I don't know what provisions are; I once researched all the caselaw on the subject with the most advanced computer system known to mankind, and didn't find an answer. My guess is that cigarettes and feminine hygiene products, as well as toilet paper, are included in the word "provisions", but I'm not absolutely sure.).
The reason for the cashier's check? That's out of your account semi-right-now, so when you look at the account (or more importantly, when the trustee looks at your bank account as of the instant of filing), it will accurately reflect an amount that is exempt.
How about just cashing the check and putting the cash under the mattress?
No. Just don't go there. I'm deadly serious.
But some folks do very well during their meeting with a lawyer.
Some experience stress during the pre-filing phase, and then relax once they review the schedules and they're close to okay.
Some find it remarkably hard to let go of the schedules, and that may be partly my fault; I try to get very accurate schedules, but no bankruptcy schedules are perfectly accurate.
Some are simply over the top, with 45 page faxes of corrections of the information that they themselves typed into the online computer system we use; and that's a function of pre-bankruptcy jitters moved to an entirely different level.
The amounts owed are a moving target, for instance.
The means test is a backward looking rolling test, and the calculations may have been made a day or two days prior to filing.
The value of the assets listed is always a best guesstimate value chosen by the client after they have done some due dilligence, for instance by going to ebay or blue book or zillow, but there is never certainty about values. All appraisals are guesses, no matter how well educated, as Chief Bankruptcy Judge Caldwell told me when I was just a little tadpole of a lawyer.
But I wish I could give an adequate level of comfort to the one client in a thousand who has real, serious problems, and who displaces the emotions about his life into the filing process, which is after all a matter of organizing a mass of disorganized data into an organized form.
And it will never be perfect; I want it much more perfect than most folks (I spent three years reviewing bankruptcy schedules at the Bankruptcy Court, so I have a pretty good benchmark in my head of what they should look like).
But full and complete perfection? The Platonic Ideal of the Bankruptcy Schedule? It is not seen this side of heaven.
And probably not there.
Because where would God find a bankruptcy lawyer?
Do a little more exercise; take the dog for a walk. Cook some hotdogs on the grill out back; when you burn your finger on the grill, it'll take your mind off the filing!
The steps just prior to filing a Chapter 7 bankruptcy case in Arizona are pretty simple. You need to review the final draft, and if there are errors, you'll email my paralegal and let her know about them, and she'll correct them.
Some issues are more important than others. If you just remembered that you own a small nation-state, and you didn't list it, you have my permission to come unglued, because I'll fire you as a client and be unkind to you all in the same sentence.
If an account number or zip code is off by a digit, email my paralegal and she'll correct that.
There's also the issue of spending your paycheck just prior to filing.
You get your paycheck sometime; a couple never gets both paychecks on the same day, because that would make it too easy. And we usually agonize over the perfect day to file to optimize the result for a client, but it's also impossible to find the perfect day, partly because the date is often forced by a pending trustee's sale or some other external factor.
The exemption for money in Arizona is a miserly $150 per person, so when you get your $3,000 paycheck, you'll probably want to consider, after consulting with your bankruptcy lawyer, paying for your mortgage with a cashier's check, and using a debit card to buy groceries and prescription drugs and vitamins and minerals and soap and deodorant, because in Arizona there is an exemption for six months worth of food, fuel and provisions (and no, I don't know what provisions are; I once researched all the caselaw on the subject with the most advanced computer system known to mankind, and didn't find an answer. My guess is that cigarettes and feminine hygiene products, as well as toilet paper, are included in the word "provisions", but I'm not absolutely sure.).
The reason for the cashier's check? That's out of your account semi-right-now, so when you look at the account (or more importantly, when the trustee looks at your bank account as of the instant of filing), it will accurately reflect an amount that is exempt.
How about just cashing the check and putting the cash under the mattress?
No. Just don't go there. I'm deadly serious.
But some folks do very well during their meeting with a lawyer.
Some experience stress during the pre-filing phase, and then relax once they review the schedules and they're close to okay.
Some find it remarkably hard to let go of the schedules, and that may be partly my fault; I try to get very accurate schedules, but no bankruptcy schedules are perfectly accurate.
Some are simply over the top, with 45 page faxes of corrections of the information that they themselves typed into the online computer system we use; and that's a function of pre-bankruptcy jitters moved to an entirely different level.
The amounts owed are a moving target, for instance.
The means test is a backward looking rolling test, and the calculations may have been made a day or two days prior to filing.
The value of the assets listed is always a best guesstimate value chosen by the client after they have done some due dilligence, for instance by going to ebay or blue book or zillow, but there is never certainty about values. All appraisals are guesses, no matter how well educated, as Chief Bankruptcy Judge Caldwell told me when I was just a little tadpole of a lawyer.
But I wish I could give an adequate level of comfort to the one client in a thousand who has real, serious problems, and who displaces the emotions about his life into the filing process, which is after all a matter of organizing a mass of disorganized data into an organized form.
And it will never be perfect; I want it much more perfect than most folks (I spent three years reviewing bankruptcy schedules at the Bankruptcy Court, so I have a pretty good benchmark in my head of what they should look like).
But full and complete perfection? The Platonic Ideal of the Bankruptcy Schedule? It is not seen this side of heaven.
And probably not there.
Because where would God find a bankruptcy lawyer?
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