Summertime activities often affect the tax returns people file the following year. Here are some things taxpayers do during the summer along with tips they should consider now: Getting married. Newlyweds should report any name change to the Social Security Administration. They should also report an address change to the United States Postal Service, their employers, and the IRS. This...

Consider if you will that your client has just filed a Chapter 13 Bankruptcy. They have intelligently chosen to surrender a luxury item - a boat or 4-wheeler or even that extra vehicle they don’t need. Because the creditor would like to preserve the value of the collateral by obtaining possession quickly, they file a Motion for Relief shortly after...

Who knew 20 years ago how apparently hard it is to account for money paid to you? Even if accounting for money was your business? Today’s raft of mortgage accounting issues were not ones I foresaw when I became a bankruptcy lawyer.Yet every day we encounter cases where the foreclosure notice follows the “all current” filing at the close of...

NCLC’s Executive Director Rich Dubois and NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson are calling on Congress and federal regulators to take action to prevent an impending foreclosure crisis in communities of color, in an opinion editorial published yesterday in The Hill. The op-ed highlights how the cumulative impact of decades of housing policy discrimination on African American homeownership, coupled with...

Two things taxpayers can do to protect themselves from identity theft is to use strong passwords and keep those passwords secure. While many people use fingerprint or facial recognition technology to protect their devices, sometimes it’s still necessary to use a password. In recent years, cybersecurity experts’ recommendations on what constitutes a strong password has changed. With that in mind,...

By Robert B. Branson and Tammy Branson, Branson Law PLLC (Orlando, FL) Congress’ goal of bankruptcy is for the honest debtor to get a fresh start. Since most federally guaranteed student loans are nondischargeable, the current outcome is a “false start” instead of a fresh start. Resolving a $1.5 trillion student loan crisis is problematic in that the caselaw was...

By Henry E. Hildebrand, III, Chapter 13 Standing Trustee for the Middle District of Tennessee (Nashville) A Non-Governmental Private Student Loan Obligation is not always excepted from discharge by § 523(a)(8). (Holmes) McDaniel v. Navient Solutions, LLC, 2020 WL 5104560 (August 31, 2020) Case Summary Bryon and Laura McDaniel filed a Chapter 13 petition in 2009. They acknowledged that, among...

By Carri Hayden Johnson, Staff Attorney to O. Byron Meredith, Chapter 13 Trustee (Savannah, GA) The filing of a bankruptcy petition acts as a stay of certain actions against the debtor or the debtor’s property. The automatic stay is essentially the fundamental reason that a debtor seeks relief in the form of bankruptcy, as it allows the debtor a brief...

1/18/19 the Treasury Department and the IRS issued final regulations and three related pieces of guidance, implementing the new qualified business income (QBI) deduction (section 199A deduction). The new QBI deduction, created by the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) allows many owners of sole proprietorships, partnerships, S corporations, trusts, or estates to deduct up to 20 percent of...