Need help figuring out our secured debt for pymt.

[sheilaE]

Please forgive me if I've asked this question before. I'm sure I've touched on this question before and someone will probably remind me...but here goes anyway.

We are getting really close to filing and will be meeting with our attorney next week for the 2nd time since retaining him last March. The one thing I don't know and want to be more prepared for when we go back in to talk to him is...what kind of payment are we looking because of secured debt. I'm not talking about our DMI because according to the means test we are close to negative. I need to know what is going to be "required" because of secured debt.

We have 3 non luxury cars that we will be keeping, 2 are paid off and the other we are making payments of $380.00 per month. One car our 19yr old uses to get to school and to work. One I use to take the our other 2 kids back and forth to school and the other my husband use to get to work.
We're hoping to strip our 2nd as we owe about $20,000.00 more on the 1st then what it is worth. We are current on the 1st.
We've paid some of our attorney fees, but still owe $1200.00 which will go into the plan.

So do we need to blue book all 3 cars and then will the values of each go into the plan along with the attorney fees and trustee fees? What else am I missing?

Thanks,
Sheila

[momofthree]

The values of your cars (unless they are all newer) will be exempt. CA has a very liberal wildcard that allows you to exempt something like $21k of any assets as well as a $3300 car exemption. Therefore, the values of the cars will NOT be required to go into your plan unless they are worth more than you can exempt.

Are you over or under median income? If you are paying nothing to unsecureds, then the balance of your auto loan will be spread out over the plan term (either 36 or 60 months) along with your attorney fees & trustee fees.

If you are going to go this route (just paying the car & doing a lien strip), be prepared at the 341. I think you're in the same district as I am, and if you pull the same trustee, he lectured my attorney (or rather his assistant did as the actual tt didn't appear), calling our filing a "disguised chapter 7 with the benefit of a ch. 13" (lien strip). It was stated that the tt is beginning to object to these types of filings and has been winning some of the cases. However, they did say that after a thorough review of our case, and the fact that it was our first filing, that they didn't feel that the totality of circumstances indicated abuse, and they did recommend confirmation. Our 341 lasted around 15 minutes vs. the 5 minutes each prior case had lasted (we were called last so we got to watch the previous ones).

[sheilaE]

Thank you Momofthree! We go talk to the attorney again next week. I'll post what I find out.