Product Description
The average credit card debt per household is $7,500, and more than 1.6 million Americans file for bankruptcy each year. The American Bar Association Guide to Credit & Bankruptcy answers the questions people commonly ask lawyers about getting, keeping, and repairing credit.
• Includes major new requirements of the bankruptcy reform bill, in effect October 2005
• Topics include credit card debt, bankruptcy, and other forms of debt such as home mortgage… More >>
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This is a succinct summary of a variety of credit related topics. It is easy to understand and suitable for a general overview of the topic. Written by the American Bar Association, an authoritative source.
Rating: 5 / 5
I gave this book a lot of points for its very existence. There are a LOT of lawyers who were involved in its creation, and getting a lot of lawyers to cooperate in anything is like herding cats.
The author is listed as the American Bar Association, but there was one primary author, David L. Hudson, Jr.
David did a great job of packing information densely into this small paperback book. The book is broken into two major categories, consumer credit and bankruptcy.
The section on consumer credit discusses credit discrimination, applying for various sorts of credit, correcting billing mistakes, and other sorts of of borrowing, including car and home financing.
The section on bankruptcy discusses both Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 Bankruptcy, with a discussion of the ways that bankruptcy is now different under the 2005 amendments.
There are a lot of features to make this easier to use, including a number of icons (little picture thingies) that direct the reader to practical tips, additional information, warnings about pitfalls, and plain English definitions of legal terms (which are particularly important in the area of bankruptcy law, where words look and sound like English, but aren't!).
One feature I particularly like shows up at the end of chapters, and it's the section called "The World at Your Fingertips". That section directs readers to additional materials to flesh out the discussion in the book.
And that's good, because this book is a sort of a resource for credit and bankruptcy swiss army knife. It has a LOT of items, and they're all good, just like the tiny tools on a good swiss army knife. But after you read the relevant Chapter in this book, you'll probably want to read more, in a more specialized volume.
For instance, if you read this and decide that a Chapter 13 is in your future, you may decide to read The Complete Chapter 13 Personal Bankruptcy Guide by Edward Haman (a NOLO book), or if you read this book and decide that you are contemplating a bankruptcy under Chapter 7, you may want to read Surviving Personal Bankruptcy by Nora Raum, both of which are available here on Amazon.
And to track down a bankruptcy lawyer, there's a new online resource called AVVO which compares lawyers like Amazon compares books, and there's Findlaw (an online directory), and it would also be nice if your lawyer was Martindale AV rated.
p.s. as I write this postscript, there is a raging debate in Congress over a provision in the Bankruptcy Code that may, after amendment, permit the stripdown of some OR all mortgages on residential real property. Will that statute pass? Listen, I've practiced bankruptcy law in Phoenix, Arizona for about thirty years, and I've watched a long series of amendments to the "New Code" of 1979; and I've watched as Congress debated in the past. The 2005 amendments took about a decade to work their way through Congress. So MAYBE the Bankruptcy Code is about to change a lot. And MAYBE it's not. But if you're contemplating bankruptcy in Phoenix, Arizona, or anywhere else, you should be aware that the law is currently MAYBE about to change in a way that could be helpful to debtors, IF they qualify and are willing to put up with a Chapter 13 bankruptcy (which makes a root canal look like fun).
Rating: 5 / 5