What if you are under threat of foreclosure, don’t want to keep your house, but just need a little more time to find another place to live? Or if you just need to finish a pending sale before the scheduled foreclosure happens?

Or maybe you don’t want or need the extra benefits of Chapter 13. Or you just want to put it all behind you in a few months instead of going through a 3-to-5 year Chapter 13 Plan. A Chapter 7 “straight” bankruptcy may give you just the right amount of help.

A Chapter 7 case:

• Stops a pending foreclosure sale, at least temporarily. Depending on your situation, and the aggressiveness of the mortgage lender, it may buy you an extra few weeks or an extra few months. Chapter 7 does give you much less control over the situation than a Chapter 13, but the extra time it gives you may be enough in your particular situation.
• It temporarily stops not just foreclosures by your mortgage company, but also by other creditors. This includes foreclosures for unpaid property taxes, homeowner assessments, or judgment lien creditors.
• Prevents, at least briefly, most kinds of liens from attaching to your house, such as income tax liens, or judgment liens by creditors who have sued you and have not yet gotten a judgment.

So if you have a pending sale of a house which has less equity than your allowed homestead exemption, and need to buy enough time to close the sale before the foreclosure or before a new lien eats into your equity, and need to file some kind of bankruptcy to deal with your debts, filing Chapter 7 may be your best option. Or if you have resigned to losing your house but need to postpone the foreclosure to give you time to save money for rental and moving costs, again Chapter 7 could well be the best tool for you.

Because the amount of time a Chapter 7 will gain for you depends a great deal on the facts of your case, the anticipated actions of your creditors, and sometimes the behavior of your Chapter 7 trustee, be sure to discuss this thoroughly with your bankruptcy attorney. Find out if the comparatively modest help a straight bankruptcy provides is enough help for you.

As bad as the Great Recession has been for Americans in general, minorities have been hit the worst. A report just released on July 26, 2011 by the Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends project reveals that the gap in median household wealth between whites and each of the two largest minority groups has not only gotten tremendously wide, it’s almost doubled in only four years.

For twenty years up through 2004, the wealth of black and Hispanic households compared to the wealth of white households did not change much. But even then, before the recession, the wealth disparity between racial groups was already astounding huge. In 2004 the median white household’s assets were worth about seven times that of the median Hispanic household’s, and about eleven times that of the median black household’s assets. By late 2009, just four years later and after the official end of the recession, these ratios had virtually doubled, with the white household’s assets being worth fifteen times more than the Hispanic household’s, and nineteen times more than the black household’s.

What is the cause of this massive increase in wealth disparity among these races in such a short time? Simple: depreciated residential housing values. Blacks, and even more so Hispanics, have their wealth disproportionately tied up in their housing:

From 2005 to 2009, the median level of home equity held by Hispanic homeowners declined by half—from $99,983 to $49,145…. A geographic analysis suggests the reason: A disproportionate share of Hispanics live in California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona, which were in the vanguard of the housing real estate market bubble of the 1990s and early 2000s but that have since been among the states experiencing the steepest declines in housing values.

White and black homeowners also saw the median value of their home equity decline during this period, but not by as much as Hispanics. Among white homeowners, the decline was from $115,364 in 2005 to $95,000 in 2009. Among black homeowners, it was from $76,910 in 2005 to $59,000 in 2009.

This Pew Research does not get into what this increased disparity among the races means for our society. I suspect it is part of the broader picture of the overall widening gap between the wealthy and the rest of us. Overall reduced upward mobility strikes at the heart of our national identity. Add to that this racial disparity, and the suddenness with which it has occurred, and we are looking at profound economic shifts with very serious consequences.