Payment if paying 100%

[wellnowwhat]

I'm just sort of curious, because I couldn't find it anywhere else in my research:

If you are able to pay off 100% of debt in a Chapter 13 within 36 or 60 months, do they still use all of your disposable income for your payment amount? Or would it be the total amount you owe divided by 36 or 60?

Would they make you pay MORE than 100% if you were able to make payments lower than your total disposable income? Seems sort of odd if they would.

[sophieanne]

Hi..I'm in a 100%/5 year plan and my payments were based on the total debt divided by 60 months/payments. They cannot make you pay more than what the debt is.

[justbroke]

It is exactly that... your total "allowed" unsecured claims divided by 60, plus your Trustee fee, plus any attorney fees that were included in plan, plus any priority (tax) debt, plus any secured debt payments.

There was a time when some jurisdictions required all DMI regardless of whether it would you could easily spread it over 60 months! I don't recall the major precedence as I don't recall if the Lanning decision affected the DMI issue.

[hmchem]

We got our discharge last week from a 100%/5 year plan. We had to pay all DMI to the trustee and we ended up paying everything off in a little over 3.5 years. It wasn't easy and there were plenty of times I wondered how we were going to make ends meet when we had some sort of emergency. Having my check garnished directly by the trustee and having a steady job that I have been doing for 30 years made it much easier but it was a struggle at times.

From reading the board it seems like there is a lot of variation in how things are done depending on the state you live in and the trustee assigned to your case. You are not made to pay more than you owe. My trustee mailed everything that I overpaid back to us during their normal cycle of sending out checks.