Did you give back the stuff that you bought with the discharged debt?
Except for the house, all but about $3K was exempt, and I negotiated with the trustee to buy that back for about $1K. My house that I bought for cash on the eve of filing was a few $K over the exemption, and I paid for that overage as well. (I paid for it by taking a distribution from an exempt retirement account.)
As for the stuff that supposedly I had that could be traced to the debt, the debt was built up over such a long time, with cash advances and balance transfers, etc., that a plausible could case could have been made that the debt was consumed with no residual asset. It seemed that when the time would come for a low interest deal to expire, some bank would offer to let me transfer the balance, so I didn't have to pay it off - whoopee! You must understand that at the same time I was building up the debt, I also had sizable assets in the stock market and real estate.
As I was averaging a net return of about 15% on my investments (or about 12% after taxes - I was an active "day trader"), since I was only paying between 0-6% on the debt, I just let it ride without paying it off. Of course, the great recession caused me to take about a $35K capital loss and the banks stopped offering to raise my credit limit or allowing me to keep the low interest rates, so I made the prudent business decision to simply shield as much assets as I could LEGALLY do and filed for bankruptcy.