What documents will I need to file bankruptcy?

Income

• Pay stubs for the last six months, every job, both spouses if filing jointly (the means test’s lookback window). Self-employed: profit-and-loss statements for the same period, however informal.
• Any other income proof: unemployment statements, Social Security award letters, pension statements, rental income records, regular family support.

Taxes

• Federal and state returns for the last two years (Chapter 13 effectively requires four years of returns to have been filed, so unfiled years become a to-do, not a secret). Can’t find them? IRS transcripts are free online and usually suffice.

Bank and money

• Statements for every account for the last three to six months (attorneys and trustees vary; bring six and be loved), including accounts recently closed and any apps that hold money: Venmo, PayPal, Cash App, crypto platforms. The filing-day balance in each account will matter; the bank-accounts article explains why.

Debts

• A recent statement or collection letter for every debt you can find, plus the free annual credit reports from all three bureaus to catch the ones you can’t. Debts left off the paperwork are the classic self-inflicted wound.
• Lawsuit papers, garnishment orders, and any judgment documents, especially anything with a date attached.

What you own

• Vehicles: registrations, titles if you have them, loan statements, and a value estimate (the trustee will look at the same pricing guides you can).
• Home: mortgage statements, the deed, last property tax assessment, any recent appraisal.
• The rest: retirement and investment statements, life insurance policies (the kind with cash value matters), and, for the schedules, an honest garage-sale-value inventory of household goods, which your attorney will help you shape; nobody is itemizing forks.

Identity and history

• Photo ID and proof of Social Security number: the two things the trustee must see at the 341, and the meeting can’t proceed without them. If the card is lost, order a replacement now; it takes weeks.
• Divorce decrees and support orders, if any; prior bankruptcy case numbers and dates, if any; paperwork on anything sold, transferred, or given away in the last two years, and records of payments to relatives, because those questions are coming and documents answer them better than memory.

About the ones you can’t find

Missing documents are normal, not disqualifying: transcripts substitute for returns, banks reprint statements, credit reports surface forgotten debts. What can’t be reconstructed is candor; tell the attorney what exists, what’s lost, and what’s complicated, and the pile does the rest.

Bring whatever portion of this you have to the first consultation; a half-complete pile makes a consultation twice as useful, and finishing the pile becomes the whole to-do list between “considering it” and “filed.”