Information Your Palos Heights Bankruptcy Lawyer Will Need To Prepar...

After your consultation and you decide that bankruptcy is the right thing for you to do and that your attorney has decided that you do qualify for a Chapter 7 or a Chapter 13, what’s involved is pretty much the gathering of all the information needed.  The first thing we need to do is verify your income.  Not only will we need to verify your income but the trustee is also going to need that information to verify your income.  We would need two months of pay advices.  Pay advices are just your paycheck stubs.   

If for some reason you are not employed, if you are receiving any kind of income at all, whether it’s through disability, Social Security, unemployment, we will provide you with an affidavit stating your income through – your income that you receive through unemployment, IRS – I’m sorry, unemployment, Social Security, disability, contribution from a family member.  Those are the things that we would write in the affidavit stating why you have no pay advices.  If you do have pay advices, you will need to provide at least two months of the pay advices prior to the date of filing.  This is very important, so if you decide to come on board and file bankruptcy, you could essentially retain us today, in October; however, you might not be done filing or you might not be done paying the fee off in January or February of next year.   

So in that respect, we would need to have your pay advices to verify your income for the first – previous two months in October, just to verify, and then if we file in February, we will also need your pay advices for the previous two months.  So we would need January and December’s pay advices, at least those two months prior.  Once we have that information and everything is verified and then everything still works, we would then need to have your taxes, your filed federal income taxes.  For a Chapter 7, we only need your previous year (2010) if you are filing in 2011.  For Chapter 13, we would need your four prior years to filing, so if it’s 2011, you will need your income taxes for 2007, ’08, ’09, and ’10.