About this site
About Bankruptcy Route
Bankruptcy Route is an independent website that explains US bankruptcy in plain English for people who are deciding what to do about their debts. It is not a law firm and it does not give legal advice.
Who is behind this site, how the pages are written and checked, and what the site does not do.
General information, not legal advice. Rules and amounts change; check with a lawyer or the court before you act.
On this page
Who is this site for?
It is for people who are behind on their debts and want to understand their options before they talk to anyone: what each chapter of bankruptcy does, what it costs in court fees, what happens to a home, a car or a student loan, and what filing with or without a lawyer involves.
The pages explain how the process works in general. They cannot tell you what to do in your own case, because that depends on your income, your property, your debts and the state you live in.
How are the pages written and checked?
Every statement about the law, a deadline or an amount is tied to an official source: the federal courts, the U.S. Trustee Program, the Bankruptcy Code and the federal rules, and federal agencies such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Federal Student Aid.
Each page lists its sources at the end, and the small numbers in the text point to the source behind that sentence. Dollar amounts are printed with the date they took effect, because they are adjusted from time to time.
When we could not confirm something on an official page, we left it out or said so.
- We do not publish success rates, typical results or promises about what a court will do.
- We do not print state-by-state amounts that we have not checked on an official page.
- We update pages when the official figures or rules change, and each page shows the date it was last updated.
What is this site not?
Bankruptcy Route is not a law firm. Nobody here acts as your lawyer, and reading the site or sending a form does not create an attorney-client relationship.
It is not a bankruptcy petition preparer. We do not fill in bankruptcy forms and we do not tell readers what to write on theirs.
It is not a court or a government site. The official sources are linked on every page so that you can read them yourself.
How is the site funded?
Reading the site is free. The site is new, and how it will pay for itself is still being decided.
We plan to offer introductions to bankruptcy lawyers, and lawyers may pay us for those introductions. That is not open yet. Until it is, the forms on the site only save your request so that we can contact you later, and each form says so before you send it.
If that changes, this page and the pages involved will say so plainly.
What if something on a page is wrong?
Rules change, and we can make mistakes. If a page disagrees with an official source, the official source is right. A contact address for corrections will be published here.