Steve's Bankruptcy Blog

Last Monday I got a forwarded letter from my lawyer that he had received from the trustee. She is apparently trying to determine the amount of overage we have over the allowed exemptions. From the letter I noticed she had a cash amount which came from our bank statements, as well as the stock, cars, etc. that she had a value on as well. She stated she need copies of bank statemnets for one of the accounts. She already has these! it was a brand new account started two days prior to our bankruptcy with all of $10 in the account. We had 10 days to respond.

I sent my lawyer a letter with some discrepancies from the property appraisal (Duplications of items), as well as information concerning the bank accounts. She had also mis-calculated the amout of cash by almost $900. This was due to a auto-debit that should not have gone through, and the bank paid it anyway making an overdraft of almost $900 which was included in the bankruptcy petition. The trustee had ADDED the negative amount into the available cash.

My lawyer must have liked my response, as he asked me to reword it somewhat so he could forward it along to the trustee. Well, I’m not sure if he did, or she responded back, or what. But last night I received a letter from him to the trustee that was very forward and blunt stating pretty much everything I had said in mine… but in a very formal tone. And with the copies of the statements I had already supplied.

So, we will see what happens from here.

Finally, after a month! I logged into my PACER account last night, and saw an order for the appraiser to be paid, which had a copy of the appraisal included. I was actually suprised. It was almost identical in dollars to what we had included in our chapter 7 bankruptcy petition.

If we didn’t have the problem with the private stock we didn’t know about, and if we wanted to challenge the trustee to the car values… we’d be right on target.

It looks like I will need to surrender about $1500 worth of stuff (Depending on how a hearing goes with the trustee about my wifes stock value). Based on what I’ve seen elsewhere on the web, we will pick and choose what personal property we want to surrender and what we will keep.

Hopefully the hearing the trustee requested will get scheduled soon, and we will be able to get on with this whole thing.

I got an e-mail from my bankruptcy lawyer today. It is from our trustee concerning the stock previously mentioned in other earlier posts. It was dated December 23, but my attorney was out of town…. (as were we) so at least it didn’t screw up our christmas.

Basically it said she is taking all of the stock as the debtors (Us) obviously do not have available funds to repurchase the stock.

Well, as I mentioned before we needed to amend our schedule C anyway due to her previous objection. We figure my wife will be able to claim a portion of the stock for her exemptions, and I will get some exemptions as well. We still have not gotten a copy of the appraisal they did, so I’m not sure what I can claim. And time is running out. My lawyer has to respond to the previous objection by January 6th.