MasConcepts Incorporated

80k of unsecured debt discharged recently. This was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done and really just wanted to write to post so that it hopefully comes up in search results for people who have one or more of the factors that made my case fairly unique from most of the cases I read about here. I’ll also share some tips I found helpful.

Disclaimers

I’m writing about my successful pro se journey, I am NOT recommending you go pro se. It was not my first choice and it made the process far more stressful. This shit is complicated and I researched obsessively for countless hours, often to no avail and still incredibly confused and unsure of what to do.

I am going to be mentioning some ways I used AI. I am NOT recommending you use or trust this tool. I also am not using AI in any way to write this post. Because of my job, I have a healthy distrust of AI and would describe my use as both contemptuous and with very little trust in the outputs. I always validated from official sources anything it told me, I always pushed back on assumptions, in short I used but did not trust the tool. I primarily used Gemini pro. The one place I will give massive credit is that AI gave me the idea of filing bankruptcy in the first place, as I was exploring debt reduction strategies.

Background

It’s really as simple as expenses exceeding income for too long. For many of those years, I was supporting myself and someone else. For the most part my income has grown gradually but steadily throughout my career, but cost of living always seems to grow faster. I didn’t really ever have extravagant purchases but never the less, creditors kept giving me automatic limit increases, and my debt eventually ballooned to over 80k. I was able to make the payments monthly but ultimately that meant I’d have to use credit to stay afloat and you know the drill, eventually it became unsustainable.

Unsecured – ~80k Taxes and student loand – ~25k Secured – ~25k on vehicle with 10-15k equity.

My income has always flirted with the median line in the HCOL areas I’ve lived. I had never considered bankruptcy and honestly didn’t even really know much about it to have ever considered it an option. I started learning more about it and heavily considering it, but the information out there was incredibly confusing.

Ultimately because I always just above median I thought I would have to do a chapter 13 and put this off for a long time. Eventually when things reached a breaking point I had a consultation with an attorney. I put down the retainer but ultimately did not end up using an attorney because I identified a very narrow window of filing opportunity and wouldn’t have been able to come up with funds to pay her quickly enough.

Tip 1 – timing

If you have predictable income, open a spreadsheet and plug in every single pay date for the next 12 months and the gross amount you expect to receive. Since means testing uses 6 month lookback periods, timing of course can influence eligibility, even if you are salaried. With this spreadsheet you can analyze every upcoming 6 month window and see if any of them would place you below median. For example, I had identified a 6 month period where every month had only 2 paychecks (generally in a 6 month period, at least one month will have 3 paychecks because if we’re paid biweekly, you on average will get 13 checks per 6 months period, not 12). That was enough for me to be under median (spoiler: or so I thought).

Also remember that median incomes are updated roughly twice a year, look up those dates and remember to re-evaluate your eligibility after those.

Tip 2 – legal insurance

Once I realized I had exactly one window where I could file and likely get a clean chapter 7, and knew I couldn’t pay the good attorney I had consulted with, I stumbled upon information about legal coverage actually being helpful for bankruptcy. I had metlife and found it was going to be fully covered. There is exactly one firm in my state I could use. I started the process with them. I was extremely unimpressed from the jump – they were not specialists, stated information over the phone I knew to be incorrect, used outdated median figures and even argued over some pretty silly basic math things like claiming October would be included in a six-month period for a case filed in May. I still figured I’d be better off with representation, so I began the process and filled out there packet (which was last updated in 2020 and was not digitalized/editable). I provided this to them. Ultimately they failed to file in time. I could tell about a week prior they were going to miss the window and prepared a skeleton petition myself, which I ended up filing at 4pm on the very last day I could have to have any chance at chapter 7.

Unexpected complication

Jumping back just a little, that plan to have a clean 6-month period to file actually did not end up being so clean. I got an unexpected large bonus which, when following the formula of the means test, placed me well above median and triggered presumption of abuse. I triggered the presumption on both forms. Hence this was not going to be an easy case. Over the next 2 weeks I spent every minute of free time preparing my full packet and got it submitted. I argued special circumstances and submitted substantial documentation to the trustee proving the bonus was not typical, had never been received in the past, and had no guarantee of being received in the future. AI was incredibly frustrating here, either overly optimistic or basically claiming no one ever wins special circumstances and doing so pro se would be a moonshot.

I had come to terms with the fact I may have to do a chapter 13, and by my math the actual amount I’d have to pay towards debt each month in a chapter 13 was similar to what I’d have to pay post-chapter 7 anyway (IRS + Student Loan + Vehicle), so my monthly reality didn’t seem to different but chapter 13 would have meant 5 years of tight-rope walking and eliminated the option of selling a vehicle to get financial breathing room (since whatever breathing room I created would just be redirected to the trustee). Same for future raises.

Where AI was useful

There are questions on the forms that are not clear, and can lead to pro se filers counting the same expense twice, or calculating things incorrectly. I did ask it to explain the different forms, the specifics of each question, pitfalls for pro se filers, etc. Again, always validating answers myself. There is a lot of self-referencing form questions, or questions that depend on what you put on a completely different form, so another thing it was useful for was helping me find all the other places that needed to be updated if I had updated one line on a form.

341 meeting

My car lender showed up for my 341. Trustee asked the usual questions, and then asked about the bonus. Creditor asked if vehicle was insured and where it was parked. Then said she had no further questions “unless the trustee wants to ask more about the presumption of abuse”… the Trustee said that is why she was asking about the bonus and that based on what I submitted, she did not believe the UST would pursue that.

Tip 3 – Court Listener

There’s PACER of course. I found CourtListener to be just as useful, if not more useful. You can sign up for docket alerts and you can explore other peoples cases a little more easily. I really appreciated being able to see other peoples “argument of special circumstances” and outcomes. This was a rare thing in my state and virtually non-existent for pro se filers. I actually found a lot of cases where it seemed like an attorney had dropped the ball on their clients, which made me feel marginally better about being unrepresented. The most surprising thing to me was how rare special circumstance chapter 7s are, period, in my state. I think I found 22 over a 3 year period, with varying different outcomes.

So then I waited. It took the full 10 days for the UST to file the motion stating they were not going to motion for dismissal.

Reaffirmation Hearing

Then I worked on getting reaffirmation agreement from the vehicle lender. I had equity so to me it was a no-brainer to reaffirm the loan. I filed the motion to approve with the court, then attended the hearing. This is one area I found very little personal anecdotes or information online about. It’s funny, you are warned throughout the process that filing pro se means you’ll be treated exactly as an attorney would and expected to understand the law and rules, no special privileges or lenience. Yet when it comes to reaffirming a loan, pro se filers have to go in front of a judge which they would not have to do if they had an attorney. A reaffirmation hearing is a very strange thing because on one hand you’ve just finished telling the court you can’t afford to repay debt, and now you’re convincing the judge you can afford to make your car payment. Because in my state (and most others I think), once you’ve gotten this far, whether the judges approves or not, you can keep paying and keep the vehicle. He was practically asking people if they really wanted him to approve it and I can say he was looking out for people’s best interest. I wanted him to approve mine so he did.

I a reaffirmed the loan, waited out the 60 days, and got my discharge.

After bankruptcy

Other than discharge, a huge benefit of this process was being forced to write down my budget so many times, in so many ways, and see how little wiggle room I truly have every month. I had already been toying with the idea of selling my vehicle. Ultimately I did, and used the equity to get a cheaper vehicle. No car note. I have some maintenance items to catch up on and am still healing financially, but I have an end in site now where the gap between my income and expenses will finally give me something close to financial freedom or at least stable financial planning.

I’m not doing anything to rebuild my credit yet. I rent, and know it would be years before a mortgage would be possible anyway. When I have a cushion and emergency fund built up, I’ll probably open a secured credit card. I’ve got so many offers in the mail, but I don’t want a credit card right now and I think the only way I’d ever want one again is if I was on such solid ground that I could set ‘autopay full balance’ and never worry about anything and reap point benefits. I really worry about everyone immediately opening new cards post-bankruptcy.

The stigma

I told everyone I know I was filing bankruptcy. I told them I reached the conclusion that at this stage, I felt it was the most mature and responsible thing I could do. People react to bankruptcy as if you just got a cancer diagnosis. I just wanted to highlight that no, this is one area of law where we have some protection, it is a lever we should use as necessary and not be ashamed of. It is incredibly irresponsible of a lender to keep giving automatic limit increases to someone whose debt exceeds their income. No one is treating that irresponsible decision as a moral failing, and it is certainly not a moral failing that I over-relied on credit cards to survive in one of the harshest economic periods of modern history.