A long-term mortgage debt with which a Chapter 13 debtor had dealt under the cure-and-maintenance provision of the Code, by paying off a pre- and postpetition arrearage under the plan and continuing to make her regular monthly mortgage payments, was not discharged upon completion of the debtor’s payments under the plan. Stop foreclosure Dallas. Thus, the mortgagee, in refusing to accept mortgage payments from the debtor postdischarge based on its assessment that the debtor had defaulted on another payment that was also due after the order of discharge was entered, did not violate the discharge injunction.

While, pursuant to the so-called “hanging paragraph,” the Code provision permitting debtors to bifurcate undersecured claims into their secured and unsecured components is inapplicable, not only when Chapter 13 debtor seeks to cram down a plan providing for the debtor’s retention of a motor vehicle securing the purchase-money claim of a creditor that provided financing within 910 days of the petition date to allow the debtor to purchase a motor vehicle for his or her personal use, but also when the debtor’s plan provides for surrender of the motor vehicle securing such a creditor’s claim, this does not necessarily mean that the debtor’s plan can provide for surrender of the vehicle in full satisfaction of such a “910 creditor’s” claim. Rather, following surrender of the motor vehicle, parties and Dallas bankruptcy lawyer are left to their contractual rights and obligations, and the creditor may pursue an unsecured deficiency claim as long as state law, in conjunction with the parties’ contract, allows for such a claim.

Allegations in a complaint filed by a Chapter 7 debtor to recover for a creditor’s violation of automatic stay in sending letters to the debtors in an attempt to collect a prepetition debt after it had received notice of the debtors’ bankruptcy at the address specified on its monthly bills, and even after it had received multiple letters from the debtors’ counsel that were mailed to this same address, and that specifically advised it of its stay violations, sufficiently alleged a basis for concluding that the stay violations were “willful,” though the creditor, on its monthly bills, had included language indicating that the debtors were not to send additional correspondence with their payments, and that any additional correspondence would be discarded. The address listed on the bills was the only address that the debtors had for contacting the creditor. Moreover, the bankruptcy notice and attorney’s letters were not mailed, in violation of this warning on the bills, with the debtors’ monthly payments but were sent separately. Finally, the creditor did not deny that it had received the court notice and counsel’s letters, but simply asserted that the notice and letters should be deemed ineffective because it had thrown them away.

Loans that were taken by a Chapter 7 debtor from his 401(k) retirement savings plan did not give rise to a “claim” against the debtor or the bankruptcy estate or to a “debt” under Dallas Bankruptcy attorney Code. Notwithstanding the documentation surrounding the loans, the debtor borrowed his own money and could validly and lawfully elect not to repay the loans, even though, by doing so, he would incur income taxes and penalties. Consequently, since they were not a “debt,” the loans were not “secured debts” the payments on which the debtors could deduct in calculating their current monthly income under the means test to determine whether a presumption of abuse of Chapter 7 arose in their case.

The issue of fraud was not actually litigated in judgment creditors’ state-court action against a Dallas Bankruptcy lawyer debtor, as required for collateral estoppel to apply under Colorado law to preclude the relitigation of the issue in the judgment creditors’ subsequent nondischargeability proceeding in bankruptcy court. The state court’s findings were not based on a meaningful assessment of the facts or a weighing of actual evidence, and instead stemmed from the debtor’s failure to respond to the judgment creditors’ motion for summary judgment.

A Chapter 7 debtor’s obligation to a for-profit corporate employer under its educational expense reimbursement program was an “obligation to repay funds received as an educational benefit, scholarship or stipend” under the student loan discharge exception, a Wisconsin bankruptcy court ruled as a matter of apparent first impression under the amendments made to the Bankruptcy Code by the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act. The debtor agreed to a program under which, if she stopped working for the employer, she would be obligated to repay the funds that she received from the employer as an educational benefit, and the debtor did stop working for the employer, thereby triggering the repayment requirement. Since the debtor did not argue undue hardship in support of dischargeability, the debt was nondischargeable.