Student Loan Interest Held Dischargeable by Supreme Court

In our last post, we discussed the right of debtors to choose when to file bankruptcy and a court case which helped confirm these rights. In this post, we discuss yet another recent court ruling which seems to favor the debtor. In this case, the ruling provides bankruptcy filers more protection from creditors.

Here’s the case: A man filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy and began a repayment plan approved by the bankruptcy court. All of the creditors that the man owed were told about the payment schedule and none had any objections. The man successfully fulfilled the repayment plan and the debts were discharged by bankruptcy court. After the debts were discharged, however, the company that had issued the man’s student loans protested that he still owed them $4,000 in interest, even though it was not included in the original payment plan. The case was taken to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the debtor, who held that the debtor had fulfilled his Chapter 13 bankruptcy obligations and therefore did not owe the additional $4,000. The court's reasoning was because the creditor did not ever protest when they were originally told about the payment schedule.

This ruling is a positive precedent for all bankruptcy filers and provides them even more protection from creditors. If creditors fail to object to payment plans within the time they are allowed to protest, they will not be able to successfully object after the debts are discharged. In short, once your debts are discharged by the bankruptcy court, you no longer need to worry about creditors collecting any more debt.

For bankruptcy filers and debtors, this ruling should be considered a breath of fresh air. This is because ever since 2005, when the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act was passed, debtors' rights under bankruptcy laws have been limited. With these two recent rulings, however, at least some important rights of debtors during bankruptcy are being established by the courts.