Don’t feel bad for the banks… the truth about Bankruptcy

This is the introduction to my book Bankruptcy 101: An Insider’s Guide to Filing Bankruptcy by Yourself, Without an Attorney, available on Amazon and elsewhere. It is a little dated, but still feels good to share…

When I first realized that the credit card companies and banks don’t care about me, it came as quite a shock. Of course, I realized intellectually that these are for profit, public corporations, who must put their shareholders’ interests first. But I believed that they were honorable corporate citizens, fair dealers in an economy where the myth of capitalism thrives, where loyalty and a handshake still mean something, where the long-term good is a consideration. I was wrong.

I guess you could say that I was a little slow on the uptake since it took me two incidents before I really came to understand how unscrupulous the large banks are. But like most people, I was so steeped in the culture of laissez-faire that I couldn’t believe banks would operate in this way.

The first incident came when I had just decided to start my law practice. At the time, I had been working in a cushy government job for a decade. The paycheck was steady, the benefits good, but the truth is that I was never going to get rich as a bureaucrat. So I decided to chase the American dream. Having read the statistics, I knew that the primary reason most new businesses fail was due to lack of start-up capital. To address this problem, I had a plan.