Percentage of payback question

[cspa522]

What numbers do I use to determine the % of payback? The total owed and the amount ordered to pay? (Say I owed $100,000 and was ordered to pay $30,000 over 60 months, making it a 33% payback?)

I have also read that unless you pay back all 100% of what you owe (in the above scenario all $100,000) you can NOT pay off a BK early. Meaning, if after a couple years I still owed $10,000 of that $30,000, and I got a bonus at work of $10,000 and put it toward the BK, it doesn't matter. It's not just done and paid off at that point, is that correct?

What DOES happen to the money if it's not applied to the balance to allow you to pay off the BK early?

Thanks!

[justbroke]

It is never a question of percent payback. The percentage DOES NOT MATTER. The only thing that matters is what is your disposable monthly income (DMI) which is surrendered to the Trustee.

Early payoffs depend on whether you are an under-the-median income filer. If you are under, then you can typically pay it off after 3 years (since you are only required to be in the plan for 3 years). If you are over the median, you will typically need to stay in plan the entire 60 months (unless you are in a "100%" plan and all your creditors did not file a claim and you pay it off early).

If you are over-the-median, just plan on being in the plan for 60 months or until you pay 100% of the allowed unsecured claims plus the administrative and priority claims (period). It really is of no use to speculate. Every one has a different plan with different income and creditor considerations. The bottom line is this: if you're in a 60-month plan, "expect" to be in it for 60 months unless you pay 100% of the allowed unsecured claims.

[keepsmiling]

Additionally, IF you get a 10K bonus.... and you aren't in a 100% plan... then the tt may just take some or all of it. Maybe. Don't be shocked if it happens.
And you'd still have to continue your regular payments.
It's not necessarily cut and dried.
And again, percent doesn't matter. There's a whole thread about that somewhere.

[katztoo]

We started out as 1% payback for 60mos and ended up paying back 10% after submitting tax refunds and our payment increasing midway through because we switched from a reg. health plan to a HSA to save money. The trustee considered what we were putting into the HSA "disposable income"!

[cspa522]

It doesn't really matter, we're not going to pay off early, even if we could, but I always see people talking about being in a 100% payback plan and if you're NOT in that I wasn't sure how to determine what percentage you are actually paying. I assumed it's the total owed vs. actually paying numbers, but wanted to be sure.

[knitty]

There's a "sticky" at the beginning of this forum that talks about % payback and how it "doesn't matter"...very informative