Drop in monthly expenses after your plan is approved

[Mailman12]

Still a little confused about the BK procedure, say that your payment plan is approved and 4 months later, you decide to lower auto insurance coverage and decide to drop cable and internet, but your income remains the same, how would the trustee find out about this? Do they do any kind of follow-up on you after your plan is approved? other than your tax returns? Thanks in advance

[justbroke]

The Trustee would not know about that and would not care. The fact is, that your expenses fluctuate over time and it is expected that in one month your electric may be $90 and your food $100, yet the next month you pay $120 for electric and $70 for food. I wouldn't want to be in that type of Plan where it's that tight and you'd be starving, but you do have time where you need to plan and budget appropriately.

Now, as to reducing insurance because you just spent $120 for electric and $70 for food... so now want to lower insurance so that you can still have $120 for electric and $100 for food is a difficult choice. You will need to personally weigh the exposure you create by reducing coverage (and maybe increasing deductibles) should an accident occur.

If you simply found a better insurance rate with similar coverage, then no one is going to bother you and the Trustee does not care. So long as you pay on time and your income doesn't increase significantly, the Trustee will not bother you at all. (Please don't ask me what "significant" means. I had done research on this topic and having read thousands of posts on this website over the last 8 years, "significant' seems to mean a 10% increase in income year-over-year. This is highly subjective and based on your local Trustee. Again, the super majority of Trustees don't bother you if you pay on time and you don't have some significant increase in income.)