Can your tenant file bankrupcty again if they’ve already filed?
If you are on my e-mail list or you’ve read my blog or Twitter posts for the past few weeks, you may have noticed I’m cleaning up from a very messy… ahem…. separation from a former tenant.
Well, as I was trying to get the tenant to vacate the premises prior to their eviction date, I had them served with a court notice to vacate the premises or show up in court.
Had they vacated a week earlier, I could have saved them from this embarassment.
However, they chose to ignore my request and took their sweet time. Not knowing if they would actually follow through with moving out, I followed through with filing the eviction with the court and having them served with a notice to appear in court for the hearing.
This did not make my former tenants very happy because they were served while their children were around and they had to explain what this was all about.
Then, my tenant kindly thanked me for having them served and mentioned they would be listing me first in their bankruptcy filing. This thoroughly confused me because I was under the belief that they had already filed and been discharged prior to moving into the home I was renting them. In fact, I was outraged. The only reason I allowed them to stay as long as I did was because I thought I would be protected from them filing bankruptcy because they already HAD!!
Lesson learned. I will be attempting to collect from them but I do not have high hopes at this point. While being extremely bitter about how they left the home and after paying the initial cleaning bill which was about 6 times higher than my standard “get it rent ready” cleaning bill, I started looking into bankruptcy law a little more.
I found this article below that explains some information on bankruptcy and whether someone can file again. Hopefully this will help some of you if you are ever put through the same type of situation. Most people cringe at the thought of a tenant filing bankruptcy. I know I did when she threatened me with naming me in their new filing.
Have you had a tenant file bankruptcy on you?
How did you handle it? Feel free to leave a comment below.
Tags: bankrupt tenant, real estate, real estate investing