Can You File?
The very first step in the process is figuring out whether you qualify for bankruptcy. When you call my office for a free phone consultation, I should be able to tell you within the first few minutes whether you qualify. How I figure that out can be complicated, but I will lay out the simple version here. If you do not qualify under this simple version, you may still qualify but I will need to do a more detailed analysis looking at your income and expenses.
One way of qualifying for a chapter 7 bankruptcy (I call this the easy way) is to find out what your average monthly income has been if you looked at your income over the last 6 months. Once I have that monthly average, I will take that number and project out what your 12-month gross income will be. If that projected annual income is less than New York’s median income for your household size then you qualify.
To give you an idea of what the median income for a household your size is – if you are unmarried the median income is $46,532. If you are married with no children, the median income is $57,006. If you are married with 1 child the median income is $67,991. If you are married with 2 children, the median income is $83,036.
What if you are above the median income? Well, for many of my clients they recently got laid off and are unemployed. Therefore, when their income for this past month and next month are $0, this brings their average monthly income way down and though they may not qualify today – they will qualify next month or the month after if they are still unemployed.
That was the simple way, the more complex way that you may qualify even today is if I look not only at your income but also your expenses. I can usually do this analysis with you over the phone.
Please give me a call if you would like to receive my FREE over-the-phone consultation where I will go over in detail with you whether you qualify for bankruptcy and if bankruptcy makes sense for you.