I do think things are half a** backwards...

[quietsound]

You know, I was thinking yesterday as i was sick to my stomach all day from this flu I have.........you do a chapter 13, (logical) you file paperwork, list creditors to the best of your ability (logical), the creditors can file claims (logical), they have like roughly three months or so to do it (logical) you have your 341 meeting within a 30 to 40 day period (logical). then roughly 30 to 40 days after the 341 you have the confirmation hearing (NOT LOGICAL), in my opinion the confirmation hearing should be AFTER AFTER AFTER the deadline for the creditor claims....!!! How in the world can a plan be confirmed and set when these creditors are still filing claims?????? this is nuts!! I don't know who thought up that rule but they need to re-examine it.

Now i do understand that no payments go out until it's confirmed....most of all your lawyer doesn't get his/her money till it's confirmed and i guess the trustee doesn't get his share either...but doesn't common sense tell you that you should wait for all claims to come in and the deadline for that to come to an end before confirming a plan?

Is it just me or am i the one who is crazy here.

[lrprn]

The way I understand it, the figures on your B22C Schedules set the amount of monthly disposable income used to figure your Ch 13 monthly payment. The amount of that payment isn't directly related to the number of your creditors who end up filing claims before the deadline. It's very unusual for secured creditors to not file claims before the confirmation hearing - it's the non-secured creditors that typically are the laggards. Also the government (the IRS usually) has more time allowed to file claims (180 days) than other creditors (90 days).

If additional non-secured creditors file claims after your monthly payment amount is confirmed, unless there's still enough in your monthly payment to provide a 100% payback to all who have filed claims within your alloted number of plan months (36 or 60), the non-secured creditors each get a lower payback % is all.

[quietsound]

oh i still think it's nuts. not all my secured creditors have made their claims yet.

[Granny]

Lawyer #1 (the one I fired) told me that my payment would not be finalized until we were 8 months into the whole process, and that's 2 months after the IRS cut off date. And then he got smarta** and said my 1250 payment could triple in that time frame. I know he was being a smarta** because our total income according to the bogus Sch I that he prepared only has 3,754 for total net income.

However, in the mean time, I have sent 2 payments. Both of those payments were disbursed within a day or so to the trustee and to lawyer #1, who has now received more than 2/3 of his fee. So they don't hold payments here in Texas.

[quietsound]

I read on here that one client had to pay her attorney 6 and $7000 I think to do a chapter 7 and this lawyer wants another few more thousand....then they might convert to a 13 in which if she doesn't come up with a certain amount of money he is dropping her. she wanted to add the money into the plan and he told her no, he doesn't do that.

I think it's highway robbery!! what don't these people understand! the word bankruptcy, can anyone tell me the meaning of this word. I always thought that word meant "have no money" gee, what is she suppose to do? pull it out her backside? it just frustrates me to no end

[lrprn]

I understand your frustration, QS. However, doctors still charge us when we are bankrupt and expect us to pay them even when we have no money. I was hospitalized 10 days after filing, and our family is doing without to pay more than $3,000 back to the hospital and my doctors that isn't included in our Ch 13 plan. If a professional service is provided, then it isn't fair to expect not to pay in return for the service. Lawyers have families to support and mortgages and car payments too.

Frankly bankruptcy is not a lucrative area of the law. Overall bk lawyers charge some of the lowest hourly fees of any area of law practice. Some bk experts believe one of the primary intents of the new law was to add so much complexity and require so many more lawyer hours to file even simple bk cases that the number of lawyers who file bankruptcy cases would drop dramatically, making it that much harder to file. So far the post-Oct 05 statistics show that many US law practices have dropped bankruptcy from the services they offer because they can't charge enough for the hours required to deal with the complexities that the very badly written new bk law have caused. Score one more for our creditors.

[quietsound]

well, maybe in future they will reverse this new law, who knows.

[aa06a47]

I don't think the new law had the effected outcome that the credit card companies wanted. If anything, they will try and lobby to change it again and make it even tougher.

With a democratic congress, they probably won't be able to pass anything that makes bk tougher. However, I doubt there will be the support right now in congress to get the current law changed. Hope I'm wrong.

[bige1030]

I think that the credit card companies had purchased a significant bipartisan segment of Congress, so that partisanship wouldn't get in the way of the new bankruptcy bill in the first place. I may be wrong, but that's how it seemed to me.

[quietsound]

all i know is that i grow very tired of it