My advice is very simple for anyone considering bankruptcy. Get as much help and professional and impartial advice as possible PRIOR to petitioning. Do not leave anything out, do not hide anything and be truthful to yourself.
CONSIDER amongst anything else PRIOR transactions which could come back and bite you – and I speak from experience. This is not an easy get out clause and I only wish I had not been as hasty to make a decision – and wish I had stumbled across this website earlier!!!!!
My partner, being the person the house belonged to, was made bankrupt in 2006 for council tax arrears of about £4,000. This was a particularly harrowing experience at the time because we didn’t know about the bankruptcy until after it happened, having not received the statutory papers you are supposed to get in advance. The person who served those papers did so by posting them through the letterbox – apparently – having applied for substituted service but the fact is we never got them or spoke to anybody beforehand, contrary to what his witness statement said.
So we were bankrupt. Due to the huge additional costs involved I tried to get a solicitor to get it overturned. This was by far the hardest part, most just wanted to get it annulled by remortgaging and paying off the debt. Though we didn’t realise it then, we would have been far better off doing that. To cut a long story short we DID eventually find a solicitor, who was (supposedly) willing to fight our corner on the basis that the bankruptcy should never have happened, but sadly he was worse than useless and apart from taking £2,350 off us, he did nothing apart from recommending we enter into an IVA, which proved disastrous. We were somewhat bullied into this, believing it was a last resort and were given very bad advice and subsequently agreed to impossible to keep to terms, so the IVA failed and we eventually had to sell the house before the Official Receivers trustees sold it anyway. They might as well have done. We eventually lost the house and were some £80,000 worse off – for a £4,000 debt.
I have never, ever found anything that would have helped us before (given that whoever we got to help us, we were effectively trusting them to give us the correct advice), or since even though I believe we have several grounds for claiming some sort of compensation. But I neither have the money or the will to fight, and am left feeling very bitter and angry. This was life-changing for us, we lost our house, it’s affected our health, and being in our 50′s on limited income we will never be in a position to own our own home again – though frankly I wouldn’t want to. At least we have nothing left to take!
