Seymour's Blog

When we file a chapter 13 for our clients, our chief objective is to make sure that the plan is successful. We want to set our clients up for success.

To have a successful chapter 13, you must do two important things on the issue of finances:

1.You must make your monthly payments to Isabel Balboa, the chapter 13 trustee.
2.You must make payments as required outside of the chapter 13 plan. This means you have to keep up with your regular payments like mortgage or rent payments, and other bills that are not beingwiped out in your bankruptcy.

Ms. Balboa closely monitors whether or not you are submitting your monthly payments. Would you like to pay Ms. Balboa the easy way or the hard way? The hard way is to have to remember each and every month that you have to get a money order, because she doesn’t take checks. You have to complete the money order and you have to put your case number on the money order, and you have to mail it to Memphis, Tennessee. Over time, this can cost a good deal of expense that can be avoided by making direct payments to the Trustee directly through a wage order.

We have many clients with good intentions for completing their chapter 13, however, there are times when our clients forget to mail their payments when they are supposed to, and other things can happen that prevent them from making the payments on time to Ms. Balboa.

We have found that the most successful clients are those that set themselves up to win. These clients make their chapter 13 plan payments the easy way.

The easiest way to pay Ms Balboa, the chapter 13 trustee, is to let someone else do it. So who is that someone else? The answer is --- your employer.

It is very, very easy to set up a chapter 13 to succeed by having your employer take some funds from your regular weekly or biweekly paycheck, and mail those funds to Ms Balboa.

If you are paid weekly, it can be done every week. If you are paid every two weeks, it can be done every two weeks. For example, if you need to pay Ms. Balboa $160 a month, and you are paid every week, your employer takes $40 from your paycheck every week and sends it to Ms. Balboa.

Our smartest clients know how important it is for their chapter 13 to be successful, so we set up their cases exactly this way. Some of our clients are worried. What will their employer think? Who is going to know about this? Can the employer do something to them to put their job in jeopardy?

If you have any questions like this that are troubling you, let us put your mind at ease. First of all, it would be a violation of Federal Law for an employer to do anything to jeopardize a person’s employment. The employer can get into big trouble, and the employer knows that. I don’t think we have ever had a client that has had a problem in this area.

If you are concerned about someone knowing about your bankruptcy, it is very unlikely to happen. Unless you are working for a very, very small staffed employer, just about every company has a separate payroll department, and the payroll department normally doesn’t know or care about which employee is or is not filing for bankruptcy.

Furthermore, bankruptcy is now considered by many people to be a very smart financial planning tool. Maybe 30 years ago bankruptcy had some sort of stigma attached to it, but not now. Today, it is something done by smart people and smart businesses. What did Chrysler and GM do in 2009? How many times have Donald Trump and his organizations filed for bankruptcy protection?

When Chrysler filed for bankruptcy, President Obama pretty much said that Chrysler was making a smart move, and that it would emerge as a much stronger company with a much brighter financial future. So too can our clients emerge much stronger and have a much brighter financial future.

People with money problems are no less worthy than anyone else. It’s not your fault that our economy is in such terrible shape. You didn’t make any major business decisions that affected the economy, did you? Is it your fault that employers all over the country are laying people off left and right?

Unfortunately, too many innocent people are feeling the pain and suffering the consequences.

We want your case to be successful, and we highly, highly recommend that we set you up to have your payments to Ms Balboa taken out of your paycheck and mailed by your employer to Ms Balboa.

This is the smart and painless way.

We wish you the very best for a successful chapter 13, and we have confidence in you that you will come out of this experience in much better financial shape, with a much brighter financial future.