Should we dismiss?

[MajorMike]

Gramma,
what caused them to be dismissed?

I have had 2 dismissed chapter 13's. It takes about 6 weeks for the creditors to crawl out of the woodwork and wham! fees, interest etc adds up quick. If you can do it, I would refile immediately. I doubt that you will be dismissed with prejudice (6 month wait) If without prejudice you can refile as quickly as it takes for you to gather up all that paper work again. But what sucks, you will have to include those 2 new credit cards, a further hit to your credit. Make sure they are zero so you can leave them off your creditor list.

in addition, by all means, while in dismissal go get 2 nice cars that can last. Then include them in your chapter 13 payment and reduce the exorbitant interest you will be charged. My trustee gave the car company 6 percent. Some give as much as 10 so it varies but will not be the 28 percent you will be forced to pay with your poor credit history.

[Yankeegirl]

We met with our attorney this afternoon and here's what we've determined:

1. We are going to let the UST dismiss the case without prejudice. Our attorney actually called the UST while we were in her office, had the phone on speaker, and we heard the UST agree to this.

2.We are taking a "wait and see" approach with regards to refiling under a 13. Our attorney agrees that it may take a while for creditors to start calling and that we should put it off as long as possible. In the meantime, we are going to get the cars we need.

3. Once we refile as a 13, the student loans will NOT be paid, they will be put into forebearance and interest will accrue.

Thanks for everyone's input. Anything we missed?

[rrockinggramma]

We deliberately missed a car payment to include the new one in the chapter 13 and thereby re adjust the interest. Once you file, everything is included anyway so the hit would be on the credit report as IIB whether or not we paid them inside or outside the plan. Inside the plan, the claim filed was for PRINCIPAL only, and then the trustee paid 6 percent to them. They received CHUNKS of money until they were paid off. The car was paid off first in our plan (well after the attorney) and everyone else had to wait. Our student loans were also put into deferrment. Your account will be immediately "suspended" by the Direct Loan people. I made extra payments as I had the money available but not always. I had to mail in a check. My trustee did make payments to them as they will file a claim in your BK (chapter 13) and they will be paid at the rate of the rest of the unsecured's. However I had 4 student loan accounts and somehow only 1 loan account was recorded. So instead of 14000 being paid at 61 percent only 4000 was paid at 61 percent. But anytime payments were made, the Direct Loan people spread out the payments over the 4 accounts and kept interest from accruing too high. I do owe about 15,000 now but not too bad.

I was dismissed because my now ex husband and I couldn't make it work. We were paying over 2500 a month with his income counted in and he was not a happy camper because 99 percent of the debt was mine alone. We had his kids all get married within a year (3 girls) and they all lived in Florida and we live in Michigan. It was expensive and a mess. We have had an on and off relationship for a while (since 2001, we were separated for 3 years) then in 04 tried to get back together. It just didn't work out. Too much anger etc between us to let it go. It was a second marriage for us and there was too much conflict over his kids and my kids. If you read the other post I had about my son and his current situation, you will see that I felt the need to make life easy for my kids and thereby put my own existence in jepardy, literally. I was not able to say no at all. But 2 years of therapy and I have gotten pretty good at it

So we dismissed and got divorced and I filed alone. I just sent in my last payment.

[Help!]

Yankeegirl, I followed this thread because our situation is similar. We have a high income, student loans and at our 341 hearing it was pretty obvious the UST wants to go to battle over the means test. All it would take to kick us out would be the UST holding us to the IRS standard for private school tuition. I believed we met the means test when we filed (based on what we were told by our attorney), but clearly the UST does not and now that I've done some reading I don't think we meet the means test either. In addition, we became aware of options with our mortgage lender we wished we had known about. We have asked the attorney to have the trustee dismiss the case and want to avoid 13 if at all possible. Did you successfully get your 7 dismissed? What was that like?