Asset verification

[bobdoe]

[backtoschool]

You are stating what you own under oath and signing it when you fill out the petition, so that is the incentive to be totally honest. Lying on a bankruptcy petition is fraud and is a crime.

That being said, the trustee will not come out to your house. There is the very rare exception when the trustee wants to appraise a certain item (art comes to mind) but that rarely happens. Trustees will often send an appraiser for houses and land though. And trustees often want second opinions of the value of cars as well.

Items should be valued at the price you would sell them on ebay for.

[AngelinaCat]

We were told to value our stuff at 'yard sale' prices. For jewelry, go to two or three pawn shops and see what you are offered. Jewelry is notoriously overpriced. Thrift stores and second hand furniture stores are good sources for pricing also.

[aljohnson007]

The TT is not interested in your household items unless you identify something of value, like sterling silver, paintings, etc. No one will come to your house in the middle of the night and say "surprise, we are here to inspect your goods." I listed household items @ $2k which was exempted and you don't have to itemize. You may have paid $1k for a sofa but if you tried to sell it in todays economy, you may be lucky to get $150.

[FloridaFiler]

TT checking assets

I am located in the Florida Central District, Ft Myers. I was told by my Atty that when someone files a 7 in this area, just about 100% of the time a TT sends out an appraiser to the home to verify and asses the value of your personal property. The appraiser schedules a time to meet at your home and goes through virtually everything. I know, it happened to us.

Just had our 341 today and had to state under oath that all assets were declared.

FloridaFiler
Member of the 60 day club.

[hereforinfo]

If your cases gets audited or the UST gets involved, they very likely could do an asset search that would turn up stuff like titles to cars, boats, homes, etc. There are other ways they can find out, such as by looking over your bank statements and credit card statements to see if any large purchases were made.

[bktmom28]

I have wondered this too. Our atty said that here in Oregon, unless the trustee really feels like you are hiding stuff, they take your word for what you have. We really have nothing of value. 85% of our stuff is hand me downs from family members, kids clothes and ours are from Goodwill and Ross, and we are surrendering our home. It really actually made me kind of sad to realize how much debt we have with really, nothing to show for it. I am not sad because we have so little. I have a happy healthy family and you can't put a price on that. My only worry is on the truck we sold to pay our attorney fees and that kind of stuff. I feel like we sold it for a fair price, but it was slightly less than FMV because it had some stuff mechanically and cosmetically wrong with it so we deducted from the price because of that and didn't want to delay our filing any longer than we had to. I am worried the trustee might go after it because we sold it for less than what KBB said was "good" condition when we feel it was "FAIR". Our attorney said it shouldn't be an issue. I hope she is right. We make 36K a year and our states median income is 75K a year. We are right below the poverty line for a family of 5 and I just don't think that there is anything that they could take from us to pay our creditors. We don't have "stuff". Sorry, just venting. Thanks for the words of advice.

[pookieny]

As far as any valuables like antiques, collectibles or jewelry, if you have insurance on them then they would be traceble by the trustee.

I filed in NY and know others that have and no one every had anyone show up at their house to check what they own.

[southernbelle]

I had a business and disclosed in my BK that I had a storage with some residual equipment from the business stored there. The TT sent a local dealer to my storage to look at the equipment to determine values (but it was pretty much worthless).

The only other thing the TT did was to have my home appraised and I'm assuming that was because there was a tax refund check and non-exempt furniture I paid to keep so I think she wanted to cover all of her bases. I think if there were no other assets she probably wouldn't have bothered. Maybe it depends on where you file and normal operating procedure for the TT.

[swampwiz]

I got flooded in Katrina, wiping most stuff out (I had some stuff in my upstairs), and I kept pretty good records of what I have bought since then, as I was required to produce receipts to get a loan to cover them. (I would have only got that loan if I could have purchased a home with an SBA loan, which now seems like a pipe dream.) I think I can get by with that and a description to the best of my knowledge of what survived.

All my stuff is in 3 storage areas, all hundreds of miles away. I wonder how that is going to work out.