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Video Transcript
Hello this is Darrell Castle. I’m an attorney licensed to practice law in the state of Tennessee and on this video today, I’m talking about unemployment and how it affects people and how it affects you specifically, here in my hometown of Memphis, Tennessee.
There’s basically two ways to deal with unemployment. There’s force and then there’s persuasion.
Sometimes, the government wants to do it with force – that’s their natural inclination. But they find usually that it doesn’t work. By force I mean that they find some kind of regulation they issue that says to businesses “you will do that” or “you will do that” or “you will pay this tax” or “this tax is going up to help fund uninsured” or something like that.
Persuasion is what we’ve been doing here in Memphis. That is persuading businesses to re-locate here to the Memphis area by giving them tax breaks and so forth.
When you give a business a tax break, like many years ago when we attracted International Paper here by giving them a large tax break, and they moved here from New York, people rejected that because they say, “these businesses are being treated differently than we are as ordinary people.” But that’s not really the case. The reason for doing it is because it’s an investment and these businesses employ people and those people pay sales tax and it benefits the community. They buy homes and pay property tax and that benefits the community. They employ people in other words and that is very important. That is the persuasion way and that’s the way that it should be done.
But also, I will tell you that civic officials – people who run cities and governments – are not philanthropists. They act in their own best interest and what they think is right for them at the time so why shouldn’t you do that?
If you’re unemployed or lose your job, why should you not think about what’s in your own best interest. Consider bankruptcy to get rid of your debt.
You can do that through a Chapter 7, which is a complete discharge of all your dischargeable debt, or through a Chapter 13, which is a way for you to group all of your payments – all of your debts – into one payment which you can afford, still while keeping your house, property, all of your cars and so forth.
All you need for a Chapter 13 is a source of income. Usually unemployment compensation will qualify until you get back on your feet, so those are things for you to consider if you lose your job, folks.
Think about bankruptcy before you think about invading your retirement account because that retirement account is probably completely exempt, meaning you get to keep it in bankruptcy. So don’t go through your retirement account and have to do a bankruptcy anyway.