Singer and actor David Cassidy, a former chart topper, television star and teen idol of the 1970s, filed for bankruptcy protection last week in Florida.
In doing so, Cassidy stated that his decision to seek protection against myriad creditors was “necessary for practical reasons to reorganize my life as I go through divorce and to restructure my finances.”
Well, there you go. That stated rationale is just about par for the course for what motivates most people — celebrities or otherwise — to invoke the legal remedy of bankruptcy as they work through challenging financial matters.
We feature Cassidy’s story in today’s blog post because we believe it is instructive. People with highly varied backgrounds and personal histories uniformly confront bracing — sometimes insuperable — financial challenges that force them to take proactive and purposeful action to shed unsustainable debt levels.
Those people can be teachers, truck drivers, sales people, police officers, retail employees, small business owners — and one-time media superstars.
The point we centrally seek to make here is that bankruptcy protection for underwater debtors is a widely available and egalitarian remedy available to any person, and one that makes flatly eminent sense in many instances.
In Cassidy’s case, filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection apparently made a great deal of sense. The entertainer is reportedly being pursued by a number of creditors for bills that he cannot settle, given his current income.
Cassidy’s comment underscoring the need to reorganize his life and restructure his finances might soundly resonate with many people suffering from severe economic dislocations.
For many of those debtors, bankruptcy is indeed a viable and sensible response to crushing debt loads. A proven debt relief attorney can explain how the bankruptcy process works and how it might be invoked in a given case for a debtor seeking a sensible solution to material financial problems.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, “Come on Get Happy … In Bankruptcy?” Melanie Cohen, Feb. 13, 2015
