Los Angeles Bankruptcy Blog

Does credit card management or debt consolidation work?

While there are some good arguments about why it might work, my experience is that there are many reasons to avoid credit counseling and consolidation.

All it does is delay the inevitable… kind of like paying your mortgage with your credit card.

John Stossel has some interesting thoughts about the mortgage crisis, subprime crisis, financial crisis, disaster and credit crunch.

Thoughts?

This is one of those bankruptcy FAQs: people are confused about bankruptcy reporting, and think it’s like all other credit reporting (seven years).

Question: how long does a bankruptcy stay on your credit report?
Answer: Ten (10) years. Source: FTC

Frontier Airlines and Linens and Things both might need to have a reorganization, it was reported Friday. Note that these are different than Chapter 13 bankruptcy, which is a much smaller reorganization (and more common).

Foreclosure Prevention Act making its way through Congress has some members divided whether judges should be able to trim the loans of homeowners who are underwater with mortgages:

The Senate is poised this week to approve the housing legislation, dubbed the Foreclosure Prevention Act. Heavy on tax breaks for homeowners as well as for businesses incurring losses, the legislation has earned the ire of unions, consumers groups and other advocates for troubled borrowers, who complain that it does not do enough to help people at risk of losing their homes. Their chief objection is the absence of the bankruptcy measure, which would allow judges to trim the mortgage debts on homeowners’ primary residences.

It’s still very early to try to assess all of this. A lot of horse-trading still to be done.