Transcript
"Hi I'm Dorothy Brown I'm a licensed insolvency practitioner and I've been in the business for over 30 years and I've helped thousands of individuals and companies through the maze of insolvency and hopefully relieved people of the stress of their debt.
Today I thought I’d talk about bankruptcy.
You may or may not be aware that bankruptcy now lasts for one year and people can make themselves bankrupt online, which of course release some of the stress of attending a court.
It's not too expensive either and they can make payments for a period of time before they make themselves bankrupt so they don't need to find the whole amount at one point.
What bankruptcy also does is relieve them of their assets and their liabilities. So, assets are normally what we need to talk to people about.
The matrimonial home is the main asset for most people in a bankruptcy they're very concerned about. What's going to happen with it.
It can be that the matrimonial home, for example if there's a husband and wife situation, and a husband is perhaps bankrupt; if the wife earns enough and can buy out his equity.
So that's helpful to know that it's not necessarily going to mean that they lose their family home.
But if there's school-age kids in the house nothing can be done for the first year because their needs come before those of the creditors - which I think actually is quite fair.
People quite often say is “I can't have a bank account”. Well absolutely you can have a bank account. Maybe just a basic one, but you do have to have a bank account because that's the way we run our lives these days.
The other thing people say is I can't have a job. We do want them to be earning a living and to carry on as much as normal that they can do.
The powers for trustees in bankruptcy are much greater than most people realise and you have lots of powers of investigation which for us can be quite fun.
One of my fellow trustees had a phone call one day from a shipping container company saying “Do you know that we're just about to ship out a Ferrari that's sitting in one of our containers?”
The trustee said “Hold on a minute, don't move don't let that Ferrari go I think that belongs to the bankrupt and I need to know more about it.”
That's the sort of thing that you can find very unexpectedly if a bankrupt hasn't told you all that he or she is supposed to have done so.
Accountants, your clients may or may not be in this situation, but if they need to discuss bankruptcy then do get them to come and talk to me and I can tell them exactly what's likely to happen and what the procedure is going to be."
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