Chapter 13
Chapter 13 is good to stop the foreclosure on your house and give you time to catch up. (For more about foreclosures, visit Stop Virginia Foreclosure.) For some people whose house has lost a lot of value, we can use Chapter 13 to strip off your second mortgage. Barack Obama has also promised to change the law, so we can use Chapter 13 to reduce the payments on your first mortgage. That would help a lot of people, but it doesn’t look like we have the votes to make that change.
Chapter 13 can also be used creatively to fix a variety of unusual problems. (Some of which I can’t put in writing). If you agreed in your divorce to pay certain bills–I’m not talking about support here, but if your property settlement was a really a “debt” settlement–Chapter 13 can get rid of those.
Here are notes from a Robert Weed I gave about why mandatory Chapter 13 was so bad–bank in 1998. It took the banks from 1998 to 2005 to finally get their way in Congress. It’s still bad.