Bankruptcy Indiana

As an Indiana bankruptcy attorney, one of the services I provide is student loan debt help. As I've often mentioned in earlier Indiana bankruptcy blog posts, it's extremely rare for student loans to be discharged, or forgiven, in bankruptcy.

You might ask then, how am I and the Columbus bankruptcy lawyers who work in my offices there, ever able to be of any help to Indiana student loan debtors? There are several ways:

In providing Indiana bankruptcy information, one of the things I stress is that filing bankruptcy automatically protects you from collection action on all your debts.  That means, until the bankruptcy case is resolved, the “automatic stay” buys time for you and your attorney to plan how best to handle your financial situation.

• As your attorney, I help you file a petition called an adversary proceeding, stating that repaying your student loan would create “undue hardship” on you. In other words, it is up to us to prove to the court that you would be unable to maintain even a minimum standard of living if you used any of your income towards student loan repayment.
• In some client cases,  I have been able to show that the student loans are not really education loans as defined by bankruptcy law, either because no formal loan agreement was signed when the expenses were paid, or because the institution was not eligible to participate in a government financial assistance program.
• Sometimes the court allows student loans to have priority over other loans in a Chapter 13 bankruptcy debt repayment plan.  In such cases, other debts might be discharged in full, leaving more room for income to go towards the student loans.

As you can see, student loans in bankruptcy is a complicated area, requiring               experience and legal expertise. 

And, whether or not any of these exceptions to  the general rule about student loan debt not being discharged in bankruptcy can apply to you,  it can prove reassuring to have a board-certified consumer bankruptcy specialist at your side!