Navigating Debt and Insolvency with Sandra Landry, Senior VP MNP Bankruptcy

Facing financial hardship can feel overwhelming, but understanding your options is the first step toward relief. Len Lane speaks with Sandra Landry, Senior Vice President and Licensed Insolvency Trustee at MNP, to discuss how Canadians are dealing with increasing debt following the pandemic. Sandra explains the significant rise in bankruptcy and consumer proposal filings since 2022, emphasizing how interest rate increases and higher living costs have strained the finances of many. They discuss the distinctions between bankruptcy and consumer proposals, providing practical advice on how individuals can manage debt and avoid common pitfalls.

Sandra discusses her work in insolvency, stressing the significance of assisting individuals in comprehending various options, such as credit counselling. She explains how trustees like herself can help people find the most suitable financial solutions for their specific circumstances. This episode delves into the intricacies of bankruptcy laws and the impact of debt on credit scores and outlines the process of rebuilding credit after bankruptcy with effective planning.

About Sandra Landry

Sandra is a motivated individual who strives to learn something new every day. She enjoys learning about various businesses and individuals in her community and working out ways to help them.

There are significant options open to both individuals and businesses which include credit counselling, orderly payment of debt, proposals and bankruptcy. It’s important that everyone understands what those options include and it’s her role as Trustee to ensure that people are able to make the right choice for themselves and their own situation.

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Transcript

Len 00:02

Welcome. My name is Len Lane, and I am the founder and president of Brokers for Life Inc, and we are Dominion Lending Centers in Western Canada. The topic of our podcast will be about what we consider to be Real Life Mortgage Solutions.

Len 00:19

Welcome back. This morning, we’re going to talk about some of the changes that are happening in people’s finances coming out of the pandemic and what we’re seeing over the last couple of years. We have seen probably more refinances come across our desk for rather large amounts of money, with people whose debt has accumulated due to whatever reason, over the last three or four years; part of that, of course, is they may need to have access to either consumer proposals or to actual bankruptcies if they’re at a point where we can’t refinance their properties or get them to a point where they’re back into a solvent position. So, my guest today is Sandra Landry. Sandra is the Senior Vice President and the Trustee of Record. Is that correct? Am I saying that correct?

Sandra 01:10

Yeah, Licensed Insolvency Trustee is usually what we call ourselves.

Len 01:14

There you go, right? So, and for MNP, rather large group, great across Canada. And so welcome to the podcast, and maybe give us a little more about your background.

Sandra 01:24

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. This is a lot of fun. So yeah, I started out my career as an accountant or as an accounting student, and I very quickly was tasked with helping some of the insolvency team members at the firm I was working for. I was nearly done my designation when I realized that insolvency was where I was supposed to be. I realized that’s what it was. So, I very quickly switched over to the insolvency field. I did the CRIP program, learning all about it, and then eventually took my trustees license, so I’ve now been working as a trustee here at MNP; we have a very big practice, like you said. We are coast to coast. We’re in basically every community from from one end of the country to the other so we do our best to service all the Canadians.

Len 02:23

Excellent. Yeah, my first experience with meeting, seeing MNP anywhere, was actually in Fort McMurray, which was, I’m sure it was a busy time up there for them several times over the years. So what exactly are the duties of a trustee?

Sandra 02:39

So big picture, our role, really, as a trustee, is to ensure people know what their options are. Make sure people know what they’re getting into and, of course, answer questions. We’re really looking at what do people have as options for debt, and it’s really important for us that people know what all of the options are, even the options that we don’t conduct out of our office. So as a trustee, I’m tasked with making sure that people understand all of those options, and that is very important. And if a proposal or a bankruptcy is not the right option for people, we have an ability to connect them with other professionals that can help them with their financial difficulty. So it is really important that we remain, you know, unbiased, and talk them through the benefits, the risks to all of those options. That’s really what our role is.

Len 03:42

Excellent, yeah. And a lot of people, of course, don’t quite understand the bankruptcy act itself. I guess. I’m sure that there’s some lawyers who probably don’t understand the bankruptcy act, but it’s, you know, it is a tool that you know, has seen over the years, seen many, many clients actually come out, you know, put themselves in a better place because of it. So I know the country across seeing issues. Finances have been tough for a lot of people. Interest rates higher considerably, when you consider that a used car in finances at 10% these days, that payments have grown and maybe not, incomes haven’t followed suit. So are you seeing an increase in the amount of applications, and are they growing in size or amounts?

Sandra 04:27

Yeah, we’ve seen a lot of changes over the years. And so if you think back to 2019 that was kind of before the bottom fell out. Back in 2019 the average filings in Canada was just shy of 140,000 filings a year. There was a major shift with the pandemic in an insolvency as well as the rest of the areas of the economy. With that pandemic, we actually saw a major slowdown in insolvency filings, which seems counterintuitive, because everybody was broke, but what we saw is government funding had increased. The creditors were significantly more lenient for people waiting for paybacks. We saw that that lasts for a very long period of time. Supply issues raised prices, but that also reduced spending. So people actually had a lot more money in their pockets. And I’m not saying everybody, but there was a there was a large segment of the country that had more money i…