My lawyer wouldn't file a motion to reduce my CH 13 payments ($1100/month) back when my hubby was filing for disability, filed a motion to suspend our payments for 3 months instead until we knew what was going to happen. Well, I called her back today because we've been having car problems and no way to fix car with the $ we are paying to trustee and the big income hit we took, and after talking everything over, she's ran our new income/expenses paperwork and is put in a motion to reduce our payments to $400! Will take 30 days to find out if approved, but am still so psyched since last time I talked to her she acted like it would be a big deal to amend our plan, but ended up doing it on the phone in 20 minutes, and she said I didn't even have to send in any paperwork, which really boggled my mind.
And get this, to get the amount down to $400, she included in an anticipated expense of $300/month for a car payment as both our cars are old (10 and 12 years old, each with 160,000 miles) so she said I just needed to find someone who would make us a car loan with a good faith estimate of all the fees included and she'd file that with the court and that it would only take a week or two to for that to be approved since it was part of the original motion she filed today there wouldn't need to be an additional 30-day approval period for that. The tough part of that is going to be finding someone to make us the car loan given our CH 13 status, especially since she said the trustee wouldn't accept a loan with interest rates over 18%. I'm hoping since I had perfect payment histories with Chrysler credit and Ford credit maybe that will help, but have a month or so to look for a loan while waiting to see if the $400/month proposal goes through. Attorney didn't think it'd be any problem since hubby's income went down by $1800/month, which is more than our total payment now (we had some offsetting reductions in expenses like childcare which is why we're still able to fund our plan) but that since his pay is disability which doesn't even count in the means test (but does for disposable income) she didn't think the trustee would play hardball with us because we could pass the means test now, and theoretically (if our expenses were higher) be eligible to convert to CH 7, so she thinks changing our plan to still pay off 40% of our base instead of the originally confirmed 65% is more than reasonable. I sure hope she's right!
Now it's off to find a car loan, wish me luck there! Maybe I can get my Mom to co-sign to get the interest rates down, although I hate to ask... I'll see what the situation looks like without a co-signer first and go from there.
And get this, to get the amount down to $400, she included in an anticipated expense of $300/month for a car payment as both our cars are old (10 and 12 years old, each with 160,000 miles) so she said I just needed to find someone who would make us a car loan with a good faith estimate of all the fees included and she'd file that with the court and that it would only take a week or two to for that to be approved since it was part of the original motion she filed today there wouldn't need to be an additional 30-day approval period for that. The tough part of that is going to be finding someone to make us the car loan given our CH 13 status, especially since she said the trustee wouldn't accept a loan with interest rates over 18%. I'm hoping since I had perfect payment histories with Chrysler credit and Ford credit maybe that will help, but have a month or so to look for a loan while waiting to see if the $400/month proposal goes through. Attorney didn't think it'd be any problem since hubby's income went down by $1800/month, which is more than our total payment now (we had some offsetting reductions in expenses like childcare which is why we're still able to fund our plan) but that since his pay is disability which doesn't even count in the means test (but does for disposable income) she didn't think the trustee would play hardball with us because we could pass the means test now, and theoretically (if our expenses were higher) be eligible to convert to CH 7, so she thinks changing our plan to still pay off 40% of our base instead of the originally confirmed 65% is more than reasonable. I sure hope she's right!
Now it's off to find a car loan, wish me luck there! Maybe I can get my Mom to co-sign to get the interest rates down, although I hate to ask... I'll see what the situation looks like without a co-signer first and go from there.
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