Oak Park Real Estate & Estate Planning Blog

Nobody in Oak Park wants to think about the prospect of a spouse’s death and how it will affect their lives emotionally, psychologically, and also financially. However, some couples need to consider such issues due to health concerns, or because they are thinking about filing for bankruptcy . We want to address some of the ways in which a spouse’s death can affect personal bankruptcy proceedings. For example, if a couple has thousands of dollars of debt that has been accrued by only one spouse, does that debt go away upon the spouse’s death? If a couple files for Chapter 13 bankruptcy together and one of the spouses passes away, how does the court handle that Chapter 13 repayment plan? We will discuss a couple of different situations that can arise when married couples accumulate debt and file for bankruptcy. Marital Debt and the Consumer Bankruptcy Option A recent article in the Los Angeles Times posed this question: What happens when one spouse has a termina...

Married couples often have separate finances, yet at the same time, they tend to share a home, furniture, and motor vehicles. What happens when only one spouse plans to file for personal bankruptcy ? Is it possible for only one spouse in a marriage to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy or Chapter 13 bankruptcy? In the event that only one spouse files for liquidation bankruptcy, how will the bankruptcy court handle joint assets? These are just some of the questions that spouses have when only one of them is considering consumer bankruptcy . To help you learn more about what is at stake and what might happen in such a situation, we will run through some key points. Individual (Separate) Property Versus Marital Generally speaking, when only one spouse considers filing for personal bankruptcy, it is often because she or he has individual, or separate, debts that she or he cannot manage. In other words, if the debts were marital debts, it is more likely that the spouses would be p...