Teresa Giudice isn’t letting something as trivial as $11 million worth of debt and a bankruptcy filing stop her from getting her shop on.

The allegedly bankrupt star of Bravo’s The Real Housewives of New Jersey has raised the ire of critics after she reportedly forked over $60,000 on news furnishings for her family’s 1.8 million home in Towaco, NJ — complete with $8,800 curtains — just days after she and husband Joe filed for bankruptcy protection from the federal government last October.

While her spending habits seem mindboogling to the lay person (or anyone who actually harbors the one essential thing you need to get through life — common sense), an attorney for The Giudice says that the money in question was an advance from the publishing company behind Teresa’s 2010 cookbook — Skinny Italian — and was the reality star’s to spend any way she wanted.

Sure — but how about spending it to actually make good on promises that you made some of the creditors that you already owe!?

“That was the money she earned as an advance for her book Skinny Italian,” her attorney Jim Kridel explained in a chat with PEOPLE Tuesday. “Since she earned it after the filing, she was absolutely free to spend it….If she put it in the bank, they’d say, ‘Why don’t you pay your creditors,’ and the trustee might freeze the assets while he investigates whether she can spend it or not.”