The short answer is probably not. The most common way to find out about a bankruptcy filing (other than being a creditor of a bankrupt party) is looking at your credit report. So if you apply for new credit, they will know about your bankruptcy. Employers and landlords may also ask for your credit report, but the fact that you would have zero debt helps to offset the negatives of having filed bankruptcy.

Bankruptcies are public court proceedings so anyone, if they know how, can see if you filed and all the documents filed in your case. But the Bankruptcy Court doesn’t give out this information for free, so if someone does search the Bankruptcy Court records for your filing, they will end up paying for access to your records. This and not knowing how to access the bankruptcy records keeps most people from searching for you bankruptcy records.

In Hawaii, a listing of your bankruptcy will be published in the Pacific Business News. PBN is a subscription-only newspaper that comes out once a week and is not widely read outside of the business community. Not many people read the bankruptcy listings in PBN other than bankruptcy attorneys.