Published in Debt Advice Features on Saturday, February 03 2007

Filing for bankruptcy is also known as petitioning for bankruptcy, the reason for this is that a petition has to be filed at a County Court or the High Court if you live in and around London.

Anyone can petition or file for bankruptcy as long as they have debts of over £750 and they are all unsecured debts, you would have to attend a hearing at the relevant court to where you have lived or traded for the greater part of 6 months, the hearing will be relatively informal and should last no longer than 10 to 15 minutes unless there are discrepancies with the forms or the information that you have submitted or given to the court.

Once the hearing is over if bankruptcy was the right solution then the judge would have made the bankruptcy order against you and you are officially bankrupt.

If a creditor wishes to make a person bankrupt they would have to follow a certain procedure in order to get the court to make the bankruptcy order, they will have to first issue you a statutory demand notice which gives the debtor 21 days to pay the debt, if this cannot be done then the creditor now has proof that the debtor cannot pay the debt and can issue the bankruptcy petition and lodge or file it at the relevant court, once there the debtor can argue that there are certain circumstances that a bankruptcy order should not be made, or alternatively can allow the bankruptcy order to be made.

A bankruptcy order can still be made against a person even if they do not accept the proceedings.