Expert: Mark J. Markus- California Bankruptcy Attorney - 4/16/2010

Question
We have filed a chapter 7 bankruptcy, had a meating of creditors and the trusteee is requesting about 10,000.00 more of moneys from us. 9,000.00 being our tax returns and another thousand of it being what was in our account at the time we filed.  The question is we cannot afford that thousand dollars to him and the only reason it was in there in the first place was because our accounts were frozen.  So is there a way to maybe not take the last bankruptcy class and get it dissmissed and then refile or is that just going to put us in a worse situation.  Or will it not even be dismissed at all?

Answer
Sorry to hear of your situation. First of all, the penalty for failure to file the post-filing debt management course certificate is that you do not receive a discharge of your debts.  It does not dismiss the case or prevent the Trustee from administering assets as he/she is required.

I am assuming that you do not have any exemptions available under your state (or applicable jurisdiction's) laws.  If you're not sure, you should investigate that and consider amending your Schedule "C" to protect the tax refund and money in your bank accounts.   

If you do not have the exemptions available there really isn't anything you can do.  You could file a motion to dismiss the case, but I would say you have less than a 1% chance of that being granted, since the criteria is what is in the best interests of your creditors, so you'd have to convince the court (and your creditors) that they would get more from you outside of a Chapter 7.

For more information on exemptions, please visit http://www.bklaw.com/exemptions.html

http://www.bklaw.com/