How Often Can Someone File Chapter 7 in the State of Georgia?
- While a Georgia bankruptcy court may accept your repeated petitions, along with a bankruptcy fee for every petition you file, it will not grant an additional discharge unless it has been a number of years since your previous discharge. The amount of time between allowable discharges varies depending on the types of cases you file. For a Chapter 7 discharge, the longest waiting period is if your previous bankruptcy discharge was also a Chapter 7 case. In this scenario, you must wait eight years to receive an additional Chapter 7 discharge from a Georgia bankruptcy court.
- If you have previously received a Chapter 13 discharge, you do not have to wait as long to get a Chapter 7 bankruptcy discharge in Georgia. Rather than eight years, the waiting period is six years between a Chapter 13 discharge and a Chapter 7 discharge.
- While the law allows you to continually file Chapter 7 petitions in Georgia, the court reduces the effectiveness of the automatic stay in order to dissuade serial filing. The automatic stay is one of the prized protections granted by a bankruptcy court, as it prevents creditors from writing or calling you about your debt as soon as you file a petition. Normally, this protection lasts until the conclusion of your case. However, if you file a Chapter 7 petition within a year after having a petition dismissed, the automatic stay only protects you for 30 days. If you have two dismissed petitions on your record within the past year, the automatic stay never goes into effect.
- If you file a bankruptcy case in Georgia and the court dismisses that case, you can usually file a new Chapter 7 petition. However, there may be a waiting period depending on the nature of your original dismissal. If your dismissal was the result of administrative or procedural errors, such as if you neglected to fill out a complete petition, pay a fee, or otherwise did not correctly submit your petition, you can file a new Chapter 7 petition immediately. However, for more serious cases of dismissal, you must wait 180 days before you can file again. For example, if you directly disobey a court order, or if you file for dismissal based on one of your creditors objecting to the automatic stay, the court will impose the 180-day waiting period.