This is a post that I wrote for the Killen Landau & Associates blog, which seeks to deal with people’s worst fears when dealing with a personal financial disaster.

The fear of losing your home is a powerful one. When their finances go south, many imagine that bankruptcy will leave them homeless. Is this fear justified? Not really, or not in the normal course of a bankruptcy.

Yes, when you go bankrupt, you give control of your assets to a trustee in exchange for getting rid of your debts. This, in theory, could mean that the house gets sold to help pay back the creditors. But in practice this rarely happens, mainly because it is not in the best interests of everyone involved. The trustee has a lot of discretion, which he or she generally uses to safeguard the rights and interests of both the creditors and the debtor. Selling the house outright usually doesn’t achieve this purpose. So what normally happens? . . . Read more.