My Trustee aka my new best friend.

Spoke with my Trustee for the first time today. She was OK. I immediately went into overly-helpful-I-have-nothing-to-hide mode but she seemed completely immune to my demeanor. A seasoned public servant, no doubt.

She asked me some basic questions, just confirming the information in my documents. I answered “yes” to everything. She was very interested in the money that the business owed me. Pretty much my entire personal debt can be traced to the business Chart of Accounts as a loan to the company. So she could see that I hadn’t been living the high life for five years, stashing money away in an overseas account. Clearly everything I had personally borrowed had gone the way of everybody else’s money. She was also very interested in the assets in the other company of which I was a Director. I am a share holder of that company and it is holding significant stock.

What I didn’t tell her is that I am currently in dispute with my former business partner over the intellectual property held by the partnership that we had prior to my bankruptcy. I don’t think it has any impact on my estate because there is no real value in it, only the value that we would assign if one of us sold out to the other. I’m aiming for a settlement where we each take what we created and walk away.

I asked the Trustee if she would have to tell my former partner that I am bankrupt. She said that even though the partnership has been dissolved, it was very recently and it still showed up on the Australian Business Register, therefore she would have to inform her. I’ve got a really bad feeling about this.

I felt the Trustee had my best interests at heart but I’m hardly a great judge of these things. She said that my estate is very complicated because there are a total of two companies of which I am a shareholder (one of which owes me over $50,000), a partnership which has recently been dissolved and seven creditors totally $402,000 (three bank loans and the rest are personal guarantees on informal loans to one of the companies). I apologized and said I was glad I didn’t have to think about it anymore.

So the letters have definitely gone out. I don't know what they say or what happens next. Apparently that's no longer any of my concern. Fine by me.

Postscript: I rang the Trustee back and spilled the beans about the intellectual property. I just couldn’t deal with the idea that I was starting my fresh, new start on the wrong foot by not disclosing fully. I’m glad I did because she said that I can’t take any legal action while I’m bankrupt. I didn’t know this. Anyway, she said that I only had to disclose if the intellectual property was deemed to be of value, the Trustee rarely takes intellectual property into consideration as an asset because it is too hard to prove the ownership and the value. Fingers crossed.