Bankruptcy Indiana

The city of Vallejo, California has just emerged from a three year bankruptcy process.  As I’ve been telling my Bankruptcy in Indiana readers, when a city or county files bankruptcy, it’s not the same as individual bankruptcy in Indiana.  Yet, it many ways, it’s similar.

It’s actually one of the differences that I want to discuss today.  I was showing my Columbus bankruptcy lawyer colleagues an article published in the Huffington Post, saying that Vallejo’s Chapter 9 bankruptcy proceedings had “cast a stigma on the city”.  Real estate agents were required to disclose the city’s status to buyers, and investment advisors needed to point out the bankruptcy status to bond investors.  The national media were writing stories about Vallejo as a caution for other cash-strapped cities.  In short, it seemed as if “everybody knew”!

Now in all of the twenty five years I’ve been a debt consolidation lawyer offering Indiana bankruptcy information, the one fear that keeps coming up concerning personal bankruptcy in Indiana is that “everybody will know!”  But unlike the case in municipal bankruptcy, the usual situation is that nobody but you, your lawyer for bankruptcy in Indiana, the bankruptcy judge, and your credit card companies will know.
 
And as far as bankruptcy being a “stigma”, take it from me, Mark Zuckerbeerg, someone who has brought Indiana bankruptcy help to literally tens of thousands of individuals – the new bankruptcy laws of Indiana are based on a system created by your U.S. congress specifically to help stop foreclosure and to help good, honest, hard-working people make a fresh financial start.

It’s all the tension and the worry and the collection efforts that are the stigma; bankruptcy is the beginning of the beginning.  A municipality’s’ Chapter 9 bankruptcy may be the stuff of news, but, in the case of bankruptcy Chapter 7 in Indiana or Chapter 13 bankruptcy law in Indiana, it’s not news-making when you’re one of many thousands making a new financial start!