Notice To Creditors

Five years ago, our neighbor Vlad opened a bar down the street. At first, it was a pretty nice place to Happy Hour with the gang, but things quickly deteriorated. Today, it’s the skeeviest bar this side of the Mississippi. Like...not even Bar Rescue could save this dive. About a year ago, we let Vlad sweet-talk us into loaning him $10,000 to try and turn it around, but not even ten grand could de-skeeve the place, and now we’ve heard rumors that the business is filing for bankruptcy and closing its doors forever. “Good riddance,” we say, before eagerly opening the morning paper to scan for the notice to creditors we know is coming.

A “notice to creditors” is a public notice alerting anyone who has a claim on a business or estate that they need to come forward with those claims within the next certain period of time or forever hold their claim peace. We’ve got that $10,000 IOU from Vlad in our study somewhere, and there’s no way we’re going to let him just claim bankruptcy and walk away without at least trying to recoup some of our investment. The notice to creditors will tell us how long we’ve got to file our claim and how we need to file it, i.e., do we need to send a letter or meet someone in person or what? It will also tell us which court is handling the claims, since we’re going to need to go to court in order to try and get our money back.