While many Louisville, Kentucky, residents are quite adept at handling most of their financial affairs without help, there are some financial challenges one should just not try to tackle without help.
Among those challenges include dealing with the IRS in a full-blown tax audit and deciding exactly when it is safe to retire. As relevant to this blog, though, bankruptcy, especially Chapter 13 bankruptcy, is also not one generally something a person should try to face without legal assistance.
There may be a rare person out there who is able to handle the stress that often comes with financial troubles and filing for bankruptcy. If that person is good with paperwork and is organized, he or she may be able to get through a bankruptcy on their own, but that is only if there is no chance the person is going to lose assets in the process.
With respect to Chapter 13, however, everyone is going to be giving up a portion of their wages or other income; so, in a sense, everyone is losing something in a bankruptcy.
Moreover, getting through a Chapter 13 is hard even with respect to those who have an attorney, as fewer than half of those who start one successfully complete it and just a little over half get to the point where they get their payment plan approved.
People who try to do a Chapter 13 alone, however, have very little chance of success, as it seems from recent statistics that, at best just over 2 in 100 filers who do not hire attorneys wind up completing their Chapter 13 plan.