Palos Park Bankruptcy Lawyer On Full Disclosure To The Attorney

Now once you got to your attorney’s office, you have to disclose everything fully, completely, and accurately and honestly.  If you don’t do that, you’re going to hamstring your attorney because your attorney needs to know all the ins and outs of your situation in order to advise you properly.  You must disclose everything to the best of your knowledge so that the attorney can advise you.  There is only one instance when you can fail to disclose something in your bankruptcy schedules and that’s when you plead the Fifth Amendment.  When you plead the Fifth Amendment, you are unlikely to get a discharge in any event; but you are using the bankruptcy court to act as a stay to allow you to prepare for your criminal trial. 

When you meet with your attorney, you need to be prepared to make choices some of which are not going to be entirely palatable to you.  You may want to save a house in a Chapter 13 plan and catch up on your mortgage arrears; but if your income does not allow you to do that then you may very well have to face the prospect of leaving the house, giving it back to the bank, or filing first a Chapter 7 to reduce the amount of your unsecured debt so that when you do file a Chapter 13 at the end of your Chapter 7 case, you can focus on the mortgage arrears and nothing else.  This will still depend on the level of income you have and it may also depend on whether or not you qualify under what’s known as the means test to file a Chapter 7 in the first place. 

But you may be forced with difficult choices such as that or allowing a trustee to liquidate items that you were counting on for a rainy day.  Again, the exemptions in certain jurisdictions are very narrow and do not allow you to keep all sorts of property.  There are other jurisdictions such as Texas and Florida which allow you to keep massive amounts of real property, but unless you live in those jurisdictions you’re stuck with the exemptions that are allowed to you. 

The attorney is going to go through your options.  He will ask you for information regarding not only your assets but also your income and your expenses.  You need to be able to provide income verification whether it’s your paystubs, information for unemployment or Social Security.  If you have any kind of dividend income from other sources, you need to provide that as well.  You must disclose all sources of income because that will affect not only the means test but whether or not you qualify for a Chapter 7 or 13.