The decision to file for bankruptcy protection is certainly a big one, and it’s rightly a primarily financial decision. But a borrower using bankruptcy gets more than just help with their financial obligations. You also get nonfinancial benefits that could be just as helpful as the financial ones. What are some of these nonfinancial aids? Discover a few of the most important you can look forward to.
1. Freedom From Harassment
As more debts become late, the borrower ends up on the receiving end of more aggressive and stressful collections efforts. This could include not only bothersome letters and emails, but also repeated texts, phone calls, and even visits at home or at work. Collection harassment — both legal and illegal — disrupts your life and adds to your mounting stress over unpaid bills.
Bankruptcy generally stops all collection activity. The automatic stay is a court order to all eligible debtors to cease any further attempts to collect debts that could be involved in the case. Some debts may be exempted, but the order stays in effect in general until the case is done. This is true even when you choose Chapter 13, which takes three to five years to complete.
2. Protection of Needed Assets
Do you worry about whether some lender will take your car away and leave you stranded? Whether you can keep the home you and your kids live in? Or whether your landlord will put up a notice of eviction?
These are more than just financial assets that come and go. These are your means to get to work, pick up your kids, and provide a roof for them. By protecting these in bankruptcy, you can focus on more than daily survival. From the automatic stay to long-term payment plans that get you out of arrears, you have a variety of tools to protect what you vitally need.
3. Removal of Uncertainty
The period before a borrower decides to file — and follows through with filing — a bankruptcy claim is a time of plenty of second-guessing and hard choices. Most Americans don’t want to file bankruptcy if they can avoid it. They know it has consequences. They may also have an ethical or moral quandary about not paying debts.
However, once you pull the trigger on a claim, all that uncertainty is a thing of the past. It’s not necessary and there’s no room for it in your new path forward. You’ve made the decision, and now all you have to do is make it work.
4. Less Household Stress
Stress affects all aspects of your life. Your work may suffer, your relationships may suffer, and your home life may suffer.
Whether you have sleepless nights, fights with a partner, the inability to focus at work, or just failure to enjoy the simple pleasures of life, your stress levels could be sky high by the time you need to file bankruptcy. The filing, though, allows you to take control of your life and ends many of the outside stressors that you’ve dealt with.
5. No More Silent Suffering
Unfortunately for most Americans, talking about money problems is taboo. You may suffer in silence for years, hiding financial woes and pretending that things are better than they are.
However, a bankruptcy filing is a forward step and an impetus to no longer hide your financial challenges. For example, you no longer have to hide that you can’t afford your car payment because the bankruptcy will either save the car for good or return it to the lender. And either way, this is a legal matter now and a matter of public record.
Could your life improve with any of these nonfinancial benefits from bankruptcy claims? If so, start by meeting with the team at Wiesner & Frackowiak, LC. We’ll help you assess your case, seek the protection you need, and reduce anxiety. Call today to make an appointment.