I received a call from an individual the other day concerning delinquent mortgage payments in Georgia. A Chapter 13 bankruptcy is an ideal mechanism to catch up on delinquent payments in a mortgage. A Chapter 13 bankruptcy lasts between three to five years. If, for instance, you are two or three months behind on your mortgage and the mortgage company is threatening to foreclose, a Chapter 13 would give you a period of time up to five years to catch up on those mortgage payments. You would take your delinquent payments and divide it by either 36 or 48 or 60, whatever length and term of your plan might be, and that is the amount of the delinquency that you would pay inside the bankruptcy. In any sort of bankruptcy, whether it’s a Chapter 7 or 13, you would still have to make your current payments. The month after you file, you would have to begin making your current monthly payments. If you are entitled to catch up your monthly payments in a Chapter 13, you don’t get to catch up your monthly payments in a Chapter 7 necessarily.

We have a lot of questions from our clients as to how you can rebuild credit after filing a bankruptcy. That is a very straightforward position. You have to incur debt in order to rebuild your credit. The first thing you might do is get a credit card, maybe it’s a secure credit card where you pay down and pay a deposit of $500 or so on a credit card in order to then use the credit card up to a limit of $500. Something as simple as that helps to build your credit report. You could have a relative cosign with you on an automobile note and that, again, helps to rebuild your credit. The main thing you’ve always got to think about in any sort of bankruptcy proceeding is that credit is what got you into trouble to start with. You want to be very judicious on how you reestablish your credit and how much you actually borrow, because the most important thing from any credit report is making timely payments.