Buffalo Bankruptcy Attorney Explains What Assets You Can Protect During Bankruptcy
As an experienced Buffalo Bankruptcy Attorney, I often hear from clients who have a false impression that if you file a chapter 7 bankruptcy that you’re going to lose all of your assets, and that simply is not true. In New York State, we have two sets of rules that we can go by in order to protect your assets. We have the federal court exemptions and we have the state exemptions and they vary, in New York State I’m able to protect Seventy-five thousand dollars for an individual. A couple is a hundred and fifty-thousand dollars’ worth of equity that they may have in their homestead, in their own personal residence.
Under the federal code, as a Buffalo Bankruptcy Attorney I can protect Twenty-thousand, Two hundred dollars, a little over Forty-thousand dollars for a couple to file for a chapter 7 bankruptcies to protect their homestead. Now you may asked, why would I choose to file a federal code as oppose to the state code? There are some real important reasons why we look at your assets and try to fit you under the best code so that we can protect the most of your assets as possible. If you have a bank account with ten-thousand dollars sitting in it and you want to protect it, under the state and the house, but you’ve used the exemption. This means all of the money that’s in your bank account is going to be turned over to the bankruptcy court to the benefit of your creditors or for that matter, if you’re going to receive a refund with regard to tax, your income taxes, that refund could be confiscated on a pro-rated basis, the payer creditors.
Under the federal code, I don’t have to use your full house exemption, I’m able to take the difference and use that toward taking care of those types of assets and at the same time, protect your house, protect the money that’s in the bank and your cash refund if necessary.
If you have questions regarding protecting your assets during a bankruptcy, contact our skilled Buffalo Bankruptcy Attorney for a confidential consultation. Let our experience work for you.
This informational blog post was brought to you by Randy H. Gugino, an experienced Buffalo Bankruptcy Attorney.
