Not sure what credit counseling is, or why it is important? Bankruptcy attorney Catherine Christiansen, from the Christiansen Law Office, is here to explain. Christiansen is a graduate of Western State University, with a thriving practice in Long Beach, California.
One requirement for filing for bankruptcy is that debtors must take a credit-counseling course. This course must be taken just to file for bankruptcy, and must be completed before you can receive your debt discharge from the court.
The attorney you choose to handle your case may be working with a specific organization — or at least he should be working with a specific organization — who offers a credit counseling service to clients. If nothing else, you bankruptcy attorney should be able to recommend a credible organization to you so that you can get started on completing this portion for your bankruptcy requirement as soon as possible.
Here at Christiansen Law Office, we actually go to the effort of registering each of our clients for a credit counseling service so they don’t have to go to the effort of finding a legitimate organization and signing on themselves. And once we have signed out client up, he is already ready to go ahead and get started on the course.
For most people, a credit counseling course can be taken online — certainly the specific course that our clients use is done entirely online. And that is a real benefit to clients, because it allows them to take the course on their own time, whenever they are free, 24 hours a way, seven days a week.
An even better thing is that I actually use the credit counseling course as a way to get my clients to carefully review the documents that we have sent to them before they sign them.
What do I mean by that? Well, all of our bankruptcy clients receive a rough draft of their petition that we have put together before we submit it to the court. I typically ask them, then, to read the petition closely and review it carefully for any additions that need to be made or errors that need to be corrected.
However, it turns out that all of the information they need to complete the online credit counseling course is also printed within those papers. So by giving them the petition before they start working on the course, we are giving them a document that has all the answers they need right within in. All they need to do is to read it closely to complete the course, and then let us know any errors they discovered during the process.
I have had many clients tell me that they were grateful that they took a credit counseling course while going through bankruptcy because it really did help them determine what their new budget should be and how they should go about getting it set up.
So these courses that people are required to take are not just a thing they have to get done by the court, and that they have to pay for on their own. They are legitimately a useful learning tool for people to help them learn more about how their own finances are structured.
This article is for informational purposes only. You should not rely on this article as a legal opinion on any specific facts or circumstances, and you should not act upon this information without seeking professional counsel. Publication of this article and your receipt of this article does not create an attorney-client relationship.
