“The sweetest love, the wildest woe is love.
What the world really needs
is more love and less paperwork.”
Pearl Bailey
Leveraging the advocacy of a good bankruptcy attorney for your case means, among other things, enlisting a skilled hand at the grueling paperwork involved in filing. In order to save yourself time and money, before you meet with an attorney to talk about the best strategy in filing for bankruptcy, you will need to show your counselor some love and take the time to make a list of all your debts.
The best place to get started on this little project is by getting your most up-to-date credit report. This not only gives you a good foundation to understanding what to list, but it will likely include a few debts you have forgotten about. However, you do not want to rely completely on your credit report when listing out all of your debts. Some of your creditors like local finance companies, payday loans and doctors’ offices do not report to the credit bureaus so be sure to cross-reference with any outstanding bills or notices of outstanding payments due.
In addition, you’ll want to go through and list out all of your spouse’s debts (especially when potentially filing a joint bankruptcy petition). You may go through the same process, starting with their credit report and then looking through statements and past due bills to tally all that is owed by your spouse.
A part of this effort will also be pulling together tax returns, pay stubs, and financial statements. All of these steps will enable you to understand what’s at stake with your case as well as understand which debts have affected your credit the most. This, too, will help as you work to bounce back after your bankruptcy has been filed and you start to build your credit back up.
The offices of Grand Law Firm are available to answer any questions you may have about what paperwork you should bring with you in your first meeting with one of our Louisiana bankruptcy attorneys.
Call or email us today to set up your appointment at one of our offices – New Orleans area or Baton Rouge.