The price of failure

A bankruptcy is told as if it began inside one head. A wrong estimate, a dream too large, a lack of caution. Society likes to tell it that way, because the story stays small and the question of blame stays tidy. But businesses do not fall in a vacuum. They fall in a time.

The time in which Captain Cork fell had a recognisable name. First came the Covid shock: shops ordered to close overnight, lockdowns that silenced the rhythm of the street, a retail sector that discovered after reopening that customers did not simply return. Then came the energy crisis and a wave of inflation that pushed up rent, stock and the cost of living all at once. Anyone running a small physical shop with an ecological and social mission in those years was not on the margins of the market but in the middle of the storm.

The bankruptcy figures that Statbel publishes every month show that Belgium was not alone in this: after the artificially low years of the support measures, bankruptcies rose again, including in retail and hospitality. I deliberately give no figure here; the trend is enough to show a pattern rather than a solitary misstep. Yet every individual bankruptcy is still read as a story about character.

This essay is therefore not a confession. The title is meant ironically. The price of failure is paid by those who fall, and collected by a system that rarely books its own failures. And the question that will not let me go is simple: what is a second chance worth if administrations keep reproducing the consequences of bankruptcy?

I tell this from a concrete place. A single mother of two, seriously ill, divorced, with a shop sinking beneath her. There came a moment when we had no roof over our heads. Through the CAW, the general welfare centre, and the OCMW, the public social welfare centre, we ended up in a transitional home. The word promises movement. It assumes there is a next stop, and that somebody knows where it is.

In April 2023 I did what society expects of someone in my position. I traded risk for a payslip. In an email of June 2024 I summed it up in one sentence.

That was the choice for security: an employer, a social status, health insurance to catch you when your body gives up. That is how it went in the story I had learned about the welfare state. In November 2023 I fell ill again. On 21 December 2023 my personal bankruptcy was opened. From then on I discovered that a social status rarely vanishes through one decision. It vanishes through a sequence of administrative steps, each of which sounds reasonable on its own.

We admire entrepreneurs while their risk is still a promise. Daring, initiative, responsibility: the vocabulary of entrepreneurship is the vocabulary of freedom. Policy plans celebrate the start-up, banks sell the loan as trust, cities ask for lively shopping streets. Risk is socially desired. It is actively solicited.

But the moment the business ends, the same uncertainty changes owner. The collective that encouraged the risk withdraws, and the loss is privatised. What yesterday was enterprise is today recklessness. The moral verdict lands on the person, never on the climate that made the fall likely.

That asymmetry is no accident. An economy that runs on risk needs losers and has every interest in keeping them out of sight. Those who fail are a reminder that the promise of entrepreneurship does not hold for everyone. That is exactly why bankruptcy deserves a public conversation rather than an ashamed silence.

My health insurance fund, VNZ, waited. It would not put my file in order until the judgment existed. In June 2024 I wrote down what that meant for our family. These are my words from the time, written in the thick of confusion, not a statement by the fund. They record what I read in my file and lived through.

A month earlier I had already written to the fund’s ombuds service, as bare as the situation was. Ill, with two children, and nothing reimbursed.

Insurability is a word rarely heard in conversations about poverty. It sounds technical and dry. Yet it decides whether a prescription is affordable and whether a day of illness brings any income. The reason I was given was that my self-employed social contributions had not been paid. Those contributions belonged to a business that a trustee was winding up at the time. A debt from the fall of the shop thus determined, before any judgment, a mother’s and her children’s access to care.

Then came the waiting period. First I was told I was entitled to six months, because I had gone into employment immediately after stopping. Then the fund went back on that decision, and it became twelve months again. That is how I noted it in June 2024, as it was told to me. A period that lasts first six and then twelve months in the same file teaches the citizen above all that an answer cannot be trusted. Legal certainty begins with being able to build on a given word.

What makes this unbearable is the sequence. From April to November 2023 I worked as an employee. Every month employee contributions were withheld from my salary, as for everyone who works. I was paying into the system that was supposed to catch me. When I fell ill in November, it turned out that today’s contributions did not outweigh yesterday’s. Access to a benefit stalled on outstanding social contributions from my former self-employed status, contributions tied to the business that was then in bankruptcy. By my own recollection I usually paid the highest contributions for years as a self-employed person; only the last ones went unpaid. That is my testimony, not an independently checked series of figures. But it shows the paradox sharply: I worked, I contributed, and I was still excluded because of a past the system itself had encouraged as enterprise.

Three layers run together here, and they must stay separate. The first is the original insurability in 2023 and 2024: a health fund that judged the contributions not to be in order. The second is the bankruptcy itself, opened personally on 21 December 2023, with the discharge the court established only in October 2025. In November 2023 that discharge did not yet exist; the fund decided on what was there. The third layer is the administrative regularisation in 2025 and 2026: after the discharge Xerius sends no contribution notice, and without it VNZ says it cannot regularise. Whether these layers are legally connected as I experience them is for a lawyer to judge. That they coincide in one life is a fact.

Sociologically this is the fault line of a system that thinks in statuses. The self-employed and the employee live in separate circuits, with their own funds, rules and memories. Whoever crosses from one to the other carries the past along as a debt the new circuit cannot read and still counts. Rights are fragmented; exclusion is cumulative. Each institution sees one piece and acts correctly within it. The whole, a sick mother of two without benefit and without reimbursement, belongs to no one.

My emails document the absence of benefits and reimbursements. What that does to daily choices is the human layer behind those words. A budget needs amounts you can count on; a disputed entitlement offers an amount you hope for. Medical costs, ordinary spending and rebuilding a life must then share the same uncertain space. I am not describing an invented purchase, missed treatment or event. I am naming what uncertainty means: repeatedly finding out what is covered, what you must bear yourself and what might be corrected later. Administration occupies the place where certainty should have been. You try to rebuild a life while the ground beneath your planning remains provisional.

From November to April I lived on the leefloon, the minimum-income benefit. The OCMW paid it as an advance on a sickness benefit the health fund was not paying. That is solidarity at its most tangible: one public service stepping in when another stalls. In April 2024 the OCMW went further. It paid my outstanding social contributions, €3,140.40, directly to the health fund.

The intention was clear. With those contributions paid, the fund could put my benefits file in order retroactively. The OCMW would recover its advances, and I the difference. The OCMW wrote to the fund to that end. On 18 June 2024 I wrote that I had had no feedback at all from VNZ about the correction of my file after the OCMW paid the outstanding contributions in full. As far as I could tell, it stayed that way for a long time. One public purse pays another, and the citizen waits in the corridor between them.

In September 2024 the OCMW wrote me a sentence I have not shaken off since. It is meant in a businesslike way, and within its own logic it is correct.

The benefit that was an advance returns as a claim once the right it anticipated fails to arrive. On 26 November 2024 debtor management reported: “In totaal moet je nog €362,53 betalen” (“In total you still have to pay €362.53”). A balance on a date, not a final account. How that claim is legally constructed, when it arose and how it relates to the bankruptcy has not yet been established. An advance on a benefit, a loan and the recovery of undue support are three different things, and not every OCMW claim automatically falls under a discharge. That is precisely why the question belongs on the table. Yesterday’s solidarity becomes a repayment plan in small instalments, owed by someone still waiting for the right that solidarity was meant to bridge.

On 21 December 2023 my personal bankruptcy was opened. On 7 October 2025 it was closed, and the discharge followed. Between those two dates lie almost twenty months. On paper they are a neutral phase: the trustee investigates, takes stock, verifies claims, reports. In a life they are something else. They are a period in which everything has already been lost and nothing has yet been released.

That period has grown longer, and not by accident. Until a reform in 2023, a bankrupt person could ask for discharge earlier, without waiting for the closure. That option disappeared. The correction matters, because a persistent misunderstanding claims that discharge used to follow automatically when bankruptcy was opened. It did not. Under the current rule, the trustee told me in January 2024, the discharge is pronounced when the bankruptcy is closed. The investigation thus determines the length of the uncertainty, and the person concerned has no means of shortening it. The exact scope and entry into force of that reform still require legal verification before this essay is published.

Put the human situation beside that clock. A single, seriously ill mother of two, rehoused after homelessness in a transitional home through the CAW and the OCMW, and an employee again since April 2023, paying contributions every month. According to my correspondence from the time: no sickness benefit and temporarily no reimbursement of medical costs, because of unpaid contributions from my former self-employed status. The OCMW had to advance what the social security system was not paying. Every institution waited for the outcome of a procedure whose duration no one in it could predict. Legal uncertainty is not an abstract notion here. It is a pharmacy bill that stays on the table.

In that same window the state could still act as a creditor. In May 2025, during the procedure, the FPS Finance applied part of my tax refund to debts from before the bankruptcy. Its reasoning, quoted later in this essay, rests on that timing: the discharge did not yet exist. I contest that set-off, my lawyer has formally challenged it, and as far as I know no court has ruled on its lawfulness. I place it here because it shows what the interim period is in practice: not a pause but a time in which the old debts still work and the promised relief has not yet begun.

Sociologically, the bankrupt person in this interval lives in a legal no man’s land. She is no longer an entrepreneur, not yet released, formally insured through her new job and practically cut off by her old status. The burden of proof lies with her, the duration is set elsewhere, and every postponement is borne by the household. A second chance that only starts after twenty months of uncertainty has, by then, already cost a great deal of what it was meant to save.

Almost two years after the shop fell, in October 2025, the court closed my personal bankruptcy. With the closure came the discharge. A legal order saying: this chapter is over, and what follows comes not from mercy but from law.

What came next spoke another language. My social insurance fund, Xerius, wrote that the contributions had been discharged, and that I could still pay them. One sentence holds the whole paradox of this file: a debt that has vanished in law and keeps haunting the administration. A discharge you can still pay off is not a release but an invitation to pay for the bankruptcy again, this time with your social entitlements at stake.

For the fund sent no contribution notice for the years concerned. It sounds like a technicality. It is a key. Without a contribution notice the rest of the chain sees no paid contributions, and without paid contributions no full entitlements. The judgment opens the door; the missing document keeps the corridor behind it shut.

On 7 November 2025 Xerius wrote something rarely put in writing: that my file had been wrongly assessed in the first instance. Ten days later the tone changed. “This email does not change our view.” The acknowledgement stood. The consequence never came.

An institution that admits an error while refusing to repair its effects reveals something fundamental about how power works in administrations. Acknowledgement costs nothing as long as it compels no repair. The citizen is proved right in language and wrong in practice.

The federal Ombudsman, to whom I turned, drew the line more sharply still. On that reading, discharge only means that creditors may no longer recover the debt; it does not mean the debt counts as paid and opens social rights. That is an interpretation, and a contested one. But it is an honest summary of the problem. The second chance frees you from the creditor and leaves you with the system.

My health insurance fund, VNZ, nowhere disputed the discharge. It wrote that it may not interpret judgments and can rely only on the data Xerius passes on through the contribution notice. Each answer is defensible on its own. Together they form a circuit in which a court decision only takes social effect once a document arrives in the right place, and in which no one is responsible for its arrival.

That is what I call a chain without an owner. One institution waits for the other, the other holds to its view, and the citizen becomes the courier between counters that never contradict one another and never reach one another either. Some of my reminders received, as I experienced it, no substantive reply. It feels like writing to a wall that looks back politely.

In February 2026 my lawyer put that chain into legal language in her formal notices. To Xerius she wrote that its administrative communication to third bodies contributes to a chain of irregular decisions. To VNZ, that the fund cannot hide behind the internal processing of a third party. This is her legal position; no court has yet ruled on it. But the word chain is now on the record, and it will not disappear.

One institution in this story wears two hats at once. The Federal Public Service Finance is a creditor in the bankruptcy and, at the same time, the administration deciding what happens to my tax refund. To see what that means, it is enough to put events in their order. The order is the argument.

Step one. The trustee’s official third report, dated 30 December 2024, records that the FPS Finance lodged a claim of €3,372.05 in the bankruptcy on 8 April 2024, fully accepted as preferential, with nothing disputed. The state thus entered the collective procedure as a creditor alongside the others, under the trustee’s supervision. Which debts that claim covered, and whether the later set-off concerned the same debt, the document does not show; that still needs to be established.

Step two. In 2025, while my personal bankruptcy was still running, the FPS withheld €1,806.09 from a total tax refund of €3,198 and set it off against an old tax debt. Only €1,391.91 was paid out, to me and not to the trustee. On 22 May 2025 Collection Flanders wrote that because the refund concerned 2023 income and the bankruptcy dated from December 2023, it could still be applied to debts from before the bankruptcy. Step three. On 7 October 2025 the court closed the bankruptcy and the discharge followed.

Step four. I asked for the set-off to be corrected. The FPS did reply, and in substance. On 22 October 2025 Collection Flanders called the set-off justified. On 24 October came: “Your reasoning cannot be followed.” The reasoning rests on two sentences that must be read side by side. The first fixes the clock; the second draws the conclusion.

Here lies the paradox of this whole chapter. The discharge came only after twenty months of investigation by the trustee, a wait I did not choose and could not shorten. That same wait is then used to refuse correction: because release did not yet exist, the state could still take, and what has been taken does not come back. The longer the procedure lasts, the wider the window in which the state as creditor goes first. Time works against the citizen, and that is a property of the arrangement rather than an accident of one file.

On 17 November 2025 I put the FPS on formal notice myself. Ten days later, on 27 November, came a reply opening with a sentence that says more than intended: “I will try to explain it once more.” Then the core: “Set-off is permitted even during bankruptcy proceedings.” And: “This is also why the balance of the refund was paid to you and not to the trustee.” Finally that, because the set-off predates the closure of the bankruptcy and the associated discharge, the writer considered it correctly handled and no refund possible. The citizen who objects receives not a rebuttal but a repetition.

Set the October and November sentences side by side. October: at the moment of set-off there was no discharge yet. November: set-off is permitted even during bankruptcy proceedings. Together they say that the state may use the period between opening and closure to serve itself, and that the discharge reverses nothing afterwards. The tax authority knew there was a trustee and an estate; the balance deliberately bypassed the trustee.

My objection is therefore not a complaint about tone but a legal question that needs precise testing. May a creditor that has lodged its claim in the estate, accepted by the trustee as preferential, also set off outside the estate? What does that mean for the trustee, who must guard equality between creditors, and for the other creditors waiting their turn? And to what extent do specific tax set-off rules give the state a privilege other creditors lack? I have a position on these questions, and so does my lawyer. As far as I know, there is no court ruling on the lawfulness of this set-off.

Place the trustee’s words beside this. In October 2023 he confirmed the bankruptcy judgment for Captain Cork and warned about the consequences of personal guarantees; on 30 January 2024 he wrote that the discharge is pronounced when the bankruptcy is closed. That was correct information, given in a businesslike way, and I reproach him nothing. The former law did not grant automatic discharge at the opening judgment either. Until the 2023 reform, however, a bankrupt person could ask for discharge early; subject to legal verification of its scope and start date, that option has gone. Release is now tied to the end of a procedure the bankrupt does not control.

On 26 February 2026 my lawyer contested the set-off in a formal notice and demanded repayment. That is her legal position, just as my own formal notice of November 2025 was mine. The objection stands. So does the question: can a second chance be credible if the largest creditor decides when it begins, and may count the slowness of the procedure in its own favour afterwards?

That it can be done differently was shown, of all places, by a bank. BNP Paribas Fortis Recovery wrote that my debt from the guarantee for Captain Cork had been closed in view of the closing judgment. No detour, no missing form, no waiting for another institution. The judgment worked. One letter proves that discharge can be implemented when an organisation decides to implement it.

Another banking experience shows the other side. When an account for my daughter was refused, Fintro’s complaints service replied that it was not its intention to explain its customer acceptance policy. My objection received no substantive response. I am convinced that my bankruptcy history is the cause. That is my reasoned interpretation, not a reason acknowledged by the bank. But to me, silence is confirmation.

Here the problem grows larger than a single file. A policy that does not explain its reasons cannot be tested, and a policy that cannot be tested can have a discriminatory effect without anyone intending it. The issue is not a proven prohibited distinction but the effect: whoever once went bankrupt carries the mark onward, into the next generation. Transparency in that context is not courtesy. It is the minimum condition for a second chance to be verifiable at all.

The Flemish Tax Service, a different authority from the federal tax administration, also wrote to me in April 2026. I do not quote that letter, because I can only show my own reply. In it I wrote that I had received their letter of 22 April 2026, “which wrongly states that the discharge was not granted”. Half a year after the judgment, I still had to explain to a public authority that it existed.

The heaviest demand for self-sufficiency can arrive when capacity is at its lowest. Illness, divorce, the unravelling of the business, homelessness, personal bankruptcy, the leefloon and a transitional home followed one another. Just as everything wavered, I had to work out which service was responsible for what, which documents were missing and why two answers did not mean the same thing. I called myself “de meest lucky sukkelaar van het sukkelstraatje”, roughly the luckiest unfortunate on Misfortune Street. The joke lightened nothing, but it kept my own language upright.

Moynihan, Herd and Harvey call this administrative burden: the learning costs of understanding how a scheme works, the psychological costs of stigma and distrust, and the compliance costs of forms and proof. These burdens are not evenly distributed. They weigh most on those with least to spare, and they shift the work of the state onto the citizen, invisibly and unpaid.

Bourdieu teaches that economic capital is not the only capital. I could write, argue, find a lawyer, petition the Ombudsman. That cultural and social capital did not vanish with my shop. And that is precisely why my experience is a warning sign. If even someone fluent in the language of institutions gets stuck in this chain, what happens to those without such resources? A second chance that depends on perseverance, networks and writing skills is not a right but a privilege.

Here a further research question about frugal living begins for me. Saving out of necessity is not freedom; it is the boundary an insufficient or uncertain income places around your life. Only when genuine room to choose returns can attention to cost become a deliberate question about what deserves to matter. Less pressure to consume, less dependency, more control over resources: that can be autonomy. It does not make the earlier poverty valuable or release any institution from responsibility. A careful budget cannot restore a blocked social entitlement. The bridge to frugality therefore begins with protection, not with glorifying deprivation.

I refuse to turn this into a heroic tale of resilience. That story places the burden back on the individual: whoever does not return with a new business, a book or a lawyer would then have made too little of the loss. The leefloon and the transitional home were not a springboard to an inspiring comeback. They were solidarity when it was needed, as it should be.

In my letter to the federal Ombudsman of January 2026 I raised a question I want to make public here: how do the Netherlands, France and Germany handle the social consequences of a discharge, and could discharge be understood as an instrument of social repair rather than merely release from creditors? This is not an established legal comparison. It is a policy question that deserves research, and one that is strikingly seldom asked.

I know the objection: creditors suffer losses, funds must treat like cases alike. But those arguments call for clear rules, not for a practice in which a statutory consequence depends on who keeps sending reminders the longest. If the law says the discharge follows from the law, then the institutions must follow, of their own accord.

This is therefore a rallying song. I call on people with lived experience, lawyers, researchers, journalists and policymakers to expose this chain together. Let institutions give their reasons. Let banks make their policies testable. Let us compare, measure and contradict. The price of failure has been paid too long by those who fell. It is time the system drew up its own account.

Lay all the answers side by side and a pattern emerges that no single letter shows. Every counter has a procedural answer. Xerius follows its view of the contribution notice. VNZ may not interpret judgments and waits for Xerius. The FPS points to the timeline of the set-off. The OCMW follows its own debtor management. Each actor takes shelter behind a competence, a document or another body. That is rarely ill will. It is the architecture. And within that architecture the cumulative damage stays with the only party present in every file: the citizen.

The amounts must be kept apart too. The €3,140.40 advance of social contributions that the OCMW paid to the health fund, and the minimum-income benefit to be repaid, which was an advance on a benefit that never came, are two different claims, each with its own legal basis and date of origin. Whoever cannot see that difference cannot judge what a discharge erases and what it leaves standing.

This is the core of the essay, in five propositions. An individual counter always has a procedural answer. The system as a whole has no owner for repair. The law discharges a debt, but administration decides whether that discharge takes effect anywhere. Protection that comes too late becomes a source of new debt: the advance must be repaid, the waiting becomes a balance. And the procedures consume the time, money and energy the second chance was meant to carry. Every month I spend on reminders, formal notices and statements is a month not spent on work, health or my children. Reintegration thus becomes a side job next to the real job of keeping the file.

A rallying song ends with questions someone has to answer. I lay them before those who make policy and those who carry it out.

Legal certainty. When a court pronounces a discharge, who is obliged to carry its consequences through every social file, and within what time? May a statutory consequence depend on a document another institution does or does not issue?

Fragmentation. Who owns the chain between social insurance fund, health fund, OCMW, tax authority and bank? Who bears the cost when every link believes it acted correctly and the whole fails?

Burden of proof. Why must the person with the least capacity prove that a judgment exists, that a payment was made, that an absence was reported? What would change if the institution had to show why a right has not yet been restored?

The state as creditor. May an authority that lodges a claim in the estate also set off on its own? And how does an OCMW distinguish an advance on a right from a debt arising after the bankruptcy?

A real second chance. What would it mean if discharge were carried out as repair, with a deadline, a responsible party and retroactive effect that does not depend on reminders? That question reaches beyond my file. It awaits a state that promises second chances and also books them.