Petition Mistake by Atty-- Modify Plan Prior to Creditor's Mtg??

[Tinker]

Hi all,

New here. Hoping someone has some advice to share.

My atty filed my CH 13 plan at the end of Feb. I am married but filing without my spouse. My creditor's mtg is this coming Tuesday.

The Trustee asked for more recent pay stubs for my spouse and as it turns out my atty miscalculated my spouse's monthly pay and deductions. An honest mistake--he calculated spouse's income based on twice-a-month vs. every-other-week (24 paychecks versus 26 annually).

In an email the atty forwarded me he said "I'll look at this once I'm in front of my computer and we can talk about it at your creditor's meeting. We'll work something out." But I'm in a panic and can't hardly wait 2 days for some insight into this mess.

I just recalculated our Schedule I correcting for his mistake and the "disposable" income goes up by nearly $400/month.

The problem is that with the living expenses he'd originally calculated, I wouldn't even have had enough left over to pay his fees and secured debt, so he had to play with the living expense amounts (cut some down in most categories) to give me enough left over to pay into the plan.

Will he be allowed to revise my plan now (increase my pared-down living expenses to a more accurate and manageable amount), or am I going to be stuck paying all the extra monthly money into the plan?

Has this happened to anyone else?

Thanks much,
Tinker

[justbroke]

Don't panic and don't worry about this. The Trustee's office is pretty good at catching these things and this would not affect anything but your payment! So please relax and let your attorney do their job. It's good that you caught it, but it's highly likely the Trustee also caught this. This is a typical mistake when it comes to bi-weekly versus semi-monthly. The Trustee is used to this and is usually very much on top of it.

As for your plan which is already squeezing your expenses, I'm concerned. A Chapter 13 should never be about cutting "through" the bone (not to the bone, but through the bone), in order to preserve property. The only way I see this happening is that you're trying to keep property that you really can't afford. It's too late for you and your attorney to sit down before your 341 Meeting, but you really need to review what you're doing.

I am really against a debtor cutting ANY EXPENSE on their Schedule I/J or on the Means Test in a Chapter 13 (based on the United States Trustee Allowances). If you don't have cushion, your Chapter 13 will fail or you will have one miserable time in your bankruptcy.

Your attorney should be able to "fix" any issues by adjusting your expenses back to reasonable amounts while dealing with any "extra" income based on the 2 extra pay periods per year.