Category: Georgia | Bankruptcy - page 2

When filing for Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 bankruptcy in Georgia, you must complete a credit counseling and debtor education session. Both are meant to help you plan your budget and put you in the best possible financial situation, but each have specific factors that are important to understand. A list of approved Georgia and Atlanta credit counseling agencies can be found on the U.S. Department of Justice website…

One of the biggest myths about bankruptcy is that it will require you to give up your personal possessions. To the contrary, bankruptcy can often help you hold onto your most significant assets. Take your car, for instance...

Credit Counseling, or “How You Can Help the Bank While Hurting Yourself” If you’ve fallen behind in your credit card payments, you have probably heard from your bank, and the representative may have suggested you look into a credit counseling program. The kind bank rep may even have offered to supply a list of credit…

Loansharking is an illegal practice where unlicensed lenders extend credit to borrowers at impossibly high interest rates and then use threats and actual violence to collect. A slightly more respectable version of this practice is commonly called a payday loan. These are small consumer loans for short terms at exorbitant interest rates. Payday loans are…

If you are behind in your bills, you’ve probably gotten letters from you creditors as well as phone calls threatening to take action to collect on your debts. As if the harassing phone calls aren’t enough, your various creditors could also: Shut off your utilities Foreclose on your home or evict you from your apartment…

If you’ve fallen behind on credit card or loan payments, you may be curious about the direct mail advertisements you’ve been getting from companies calling themselves “debt resolution services.” They promise to help you settle your debt for significantly less than you owe. It sounds great until you find out you have to pay them…

In February, Wells Fargo & Co., the world’s largest bank, agreed to settle a mortgage-lending lawsuit for $1.2 billion. That, however, isn’t even the largest penalty the bank has paid: in 2013, it paid more than $5 billion in settlements and nearly $2 billion in violations. Wells Fargo is just one of many banks fined…

The Big Short, the Oscar-nominated film about the 2008 housing crisis, is an instructive, sometimes funny, and intense human drama about fraud and greed in the financial world. The film exposes the corruption that led to the near collapse of our banking system, but offers little comfort to the millions of Americans who lost their…

Donald Trump, the New York billionaire, real estate mogul and television celebrity, has been making headlines for months as a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. That has prompted his many challengers to insinuate that his business record is not what it appears to be. Opponent Carly Fiorina, a former CEO whose business record…

If you have defaulted on your car loan, the lender has the right to repossess it provided he does not “breach the peace.” This can put you in a terrible bind if you rely on your car to get to work or to run errands for your household. Sure, you can keep your car in…