Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Bankruptcy Blogs -> Arizona Bankruptcy Attorney Blog

Bankruptcy

: Arizona Bankruptcy Attorney Blog

How Long Until You Get Good Credit Again After You File a Chapter 7 Bankruptcy?

By Joseph McDaniel, Esq.

I touched on this issue recently.

Your bankruptcy filing will stay on your credit report for a long time. It may be a decade, and if you file a Chapter 13, it may be longer, because your case will last five years in cases in which you didn't pass the Mean, Mean Means Test.

Now, I'm not a credit expert; I'm an Arizona Bankruptcy Attorney.

But the topic of credit repair comes up in my office from time to time, because that's a topic that relates to your life after bankruptcy.

And every now and then I get to talk to somebody who is a professional in the mortgage industry, who needs to scrape off two hundred thousand in debt, or twenty million, depending on the day.

While I'm not a credit expert, those guys actually are, because they get paid when they find a way to get somebody a new mortgage.

So I ask them questions, the same way I quiz somebody who visits me and works as a telephone bill collector, or a credit manager at a car lot, because I want to know what they can tell me about conditions at the front lines in the Debt Wars.

And the last series of mortgage guys I talked to were consistent in the songs they sang; they told me that some banks wouldn't play, but that in general it took two years after a bankruptcy until somebody would qualify to buy a new home, if their income and other metrics met the relevant standards.

If I were filing a bankruptcy tomorrow, I would first get ten books from Amazon with titles like "How to Develop a Super-Powered Credit Score" (note: that's only an example; as far as I know today, a book with that exact title does not exist).

Then I would read them and relentlessly execute the plan that emerged from the ten books.

And after I filed a bankruptcy, and made some surplus income, I'd save like a crazed weasel, because retirement is good.

But that's just my suggestion; feel free to ignore that, and save, or not.

Your choice!

Full post as published by Arizona Bankruptcy Attorney Blog on January 20, 2011 (boomark / email).