When I went before a bankruptcy trustee<font-size=”4″> this past Friday, you could see in his eyeballs this was not a case he wanted to spend time on. My case is more complicated than the average Joe who gets a paycheck, racks up debt, and now wants a fresh start. Or the contractor who is hurting thanks to congress helping everybody but us.
My case has more beef because, in 2007, I allowed people, trusted colleagues, if you will, to use my name to acquire real estate. They were to manage the parcel and I would eventually get a small fee for being the one who could sign for it. Did I say I was working with people I swore I could trust?
Well, they weren’t really. There were two properties and upon closing, my trusted partners pulled a collective collective $586,000, keeping every dime for themselves, sharing nothing with me. Well that’s not
entirely true. They did share something with me. The mess.
The five cent version goes like this: one lender personally told me that the appraised came in at a million dollars over the loan amount, giving me the confidence and plenty of wiggle room, so I thought, if we had to sell quickly.
The second house I kind of signed for as a favor to help a family out of foreclosure. I never met this family, they occasionally got mail in my name, and my trusted colleagues kept the $186,000 pulled from that deal. Again, keeping every last cent for themselves. I was told the money was needed to invest so that interest earned could be used to pay the mortgage and other expenses.
There’s always reasons why. There’s never a shortage of excuses of why some things pan out the way they do.
Then the markets crashed in September ‘08, and everybody tanked. (Everybody except congress, but that’ll have to be another post!) The bottom line is I now have two houses on my record that have foreclosed, both of them having made other people lots of money. And that is why the FBI got involved. Turns out my trusted colleagues showed plenty of just-cause to the feds, and, like a Class 5 hurricane, left a lot of people damaged in their wake.
So there I am, in front of the bankruptcy trustee, who, by the way, isn’t looking for work ‘cause their calendars are full these days. Trustees are independent contractor appointed by the government and allowed to charge a fee. Which can add up, making Chapter 13 a big business.
So with so many people screwed financially, and filing for bankruptcy, when someone like me comes along, not the average Joe, proposing a small payment plan, which is basically where I’m at, the person holding the strings, the trustee, gets to decide if this case is worth his time. Furthermore, you could see in the trustee’s eyes that he sees those two houses (mentioned here) as purchases I made rather than investments that went bitterly bad.
The trustee obviously thinks I’m workin’ the system. And the irony is, I’m really not. If I have one goal it’s to buy some time to allow me to recover. For the trustee’s part, I represent a lot of work and business is good for him right now.
Over and out for now…..
Renegade Financial Planner
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