Bankruptcy

It clears unsecured balances and leaves whole categories standing: support, most student loans, recent income tax, fraud debts. So the opening move is not choosing a chapter. It is adding up what you owe and asking how much of it would still be there the morning after a discharge. If most of it survives, filing solves less than it appears to.

The guides here sit at different points of one sequence: deciding, qualifying, filing, the trustee meeting, the discharge, and the years after. Read out of order they can seem to contradict each other, because a rule about who may file says nothing about what happens once a case closes.

The most common framing error is treating the two chapters as degrees of severity. They are not a scale from mild to drastic; the choice falls out of income, home equity and arrears on secured payments you want to keep. And much of it turns on a date rather than on a person: eligibility is calculated from the last six full calendar months, so a household can fail it one month and pass the next with nothing having changed.

This section will not tell you whether to file, or estimate an outcome, because that depends on your state’s exemptions and on details I am not in a position to know. No law firm or filing service is promoted here. Where a figure goes stale on its own schedule, court fees and state median incomes among them, you are sent to the agency that publishes it.