341, US Trustee, and Continuation

[abp559]

We (spouse and I) had our 341 recently and the US Trustee came. The good news, we went first. The bad news, the US Trustee is interested in our case. Income over last six months averaged 8k, so I think he wanted to see if they could break our means test. Some of the numbers in our means test were misplaced (we had pre-school expenses in the education line instead of the child care line, which actually works out better for us since there is no limit on child care like there is on education). All of the expenses I listed are accurate reflections of what we spent over the last year and what I expect we will spend over the next year.

The trustee gave us a hard time for claiming the measly $60 "additional" food and clothing, for a household of 5, and also about our cars. Even if we sold our reliable minivan for some old beater, we'd still get the standard $489 in ownership expenses so we could get it repaired every other week.

My question is, how far will the UST and the case trustee go to beat down our numbers? Right now, the expenses add up to over 500 more than average income over the preceding six months. Will they try to prove that our expenses are unreasonable?

[biotechsolution]

8K/month?? 96K/year? what is the mean for a family of 5?

[Dennis1971]

I'm pretty sure the median for Indiana is a little over $76,000 a year for a family of five, but it varies by individual state.

[laurannm]

What were some of the expenses you listed (I assume you mean expenses that were outside of the IRS standards)?

[abp559]

Mean for a family of 5 in California is 83k/year. Additional amounts include $591 for one of our cars (that's averaging the total amount left to pay over 60 months, so it's only $102 more than the standard), 100/mo for term life, 450 for childcare (after I do the revision, for preschool for one child and babysitting for all of them while my wife goes to school part time, averaged over the whole year to take into account summer vacation), 250 for health and dental insurance, and 2400 for our first and second mortgages.

One additional problem that may come up is that our second mortgage is variable rate. The payments over the last few months have been lower than usual, but at the contractual maximum it would be something like $1500/mo by itself (we put down 700 as the average monthly payment). We still seem to have equity in the house, but it's comfortably within the $75k exemption in California.