Bankruptcy Indiana

Back almost three years ago, one of the good bankruptcy attorneys in the Indiana Zuckerberg bankruptcy law office made a remark that I quoted in Bankruptcy in Indiana. That remark is truer today than ever: "No one can work in this field of bankruptcy law," she said, "without thinking every day, 'There, but for the grace of God, go I.'"

In fact, as a debt consolidation lawyer offering bankruptcy services in Indiana for more than twenty years, one of my missions is to help Indiana bankruptcy clients focus on the future rather than on their own past failures.  Two of the top 15 myths about bankruptcy in Indiana have to do with failure:

• Filing bankruptcy means you're a bad person
   
• Only deadbeats file bankruptcy

You can imagine, then, how fascinated I was, as a longtime bankruptcy lawyer in Indiana, by the notion that failure may actually be an important, even an indispensable, ingredient in success!

That's exactly the concept presented by local author Robby Slaughter in his new book Failure: the Secret to Success. We need to be able to recover from our mistakes, he teaches, but also to "have the fortitude to go back and study what we did wrong."

"Failure often educates us by showing us what must be done," says Slaughter. I discussed the book with my colleagues the Columbus bankruptcy lawyers who work in the Zuckerberg bankruptcy law offices.  We agreed that, if clients who file under Chapter 13 bankruptcy laws in Indiana are to  successfully emerge from that bankruptcy after three to five years of making debt repayments, they need to have learned how to operate their finances using better money management principles.  The "failure" will indeed have provided an opportunity for growth, and filing bankruptcy in Indiana will turn out to offer them a fresh financial start.

One of the most important aspects of my work providing Indiana bankruptcy help is "forward focus".  One of my favorite chapters in the book was about Abraham Lincoln.  Lincoln had lost a fiancé and three of his children to death, had a failed business, and had trouble finding a job.  In fact Abe Lincoln had his possessions seized as part of frontier bankruptcy proceedings! Despite (Slaughter suggests it's because of ) all these failures, Lincoln went on to become an American hero and president of our nation.

Bankruptcy, as I've written so often in these Bankruptcy in Indiana articles, is not an end, but a beginning.  If it's a failure at all, bankruptcy can be a bridge to a future of success.