Car dilemma

[businessman]

My wife and I just turned in our Jeep which had a lease that was up. We still have a Chevy Tahoe that is a bit upside down that we're 1 1/2 months behind on. We're probably 3-4 weeks away from filing, but we're not sure about what to do with getting another car (we're going to turn in the Tahoe).

We're filing Chapter 7 on about 1.2 million of debt, the great majority of it a commercial lease that we had to break when we went out of business. We have about 10K cash, and we're concerned about transportation once our Tahoe is gone. We've lost our house, our two business locations, and are currently both unemployed looking for work.

My question is, if we bought a decent used car for 8K cash, would we lose that car during our Chapter 7 since the value is over the exemption? I guess I just don't know how to solve the car issue once we file. We can't get a decent car loan because of our trashed credit. Any ideas?

[keepmine]

You wouldn't lose the car. You can negotiate with the trustee to buyout any excess equity.
It'll be cleaner to just buy something that fits into your states exemption level and then see if you can exempt the cash in some sort of wildcard {if your state exemptions provide for that}

Trashed credit is not the only reason you can't get a car loan. The fact that nobody is employed is the biggest obstacle.I'll say again-don't pull the bk trigger prematurely.

[businessman]

You can negotiate with the trustee to buyout any excess equity.

What do you mean by this?

[ccsjoe]

Businessman, you're in CA and you have no house correct? You, like me, have a huge wildcard that you can apply to anything, over 20K in wildcard. Are you exempting that much else already?

Actually see my response to your other thread.

As far as negotiating with trustee, yes, you can negotiate to pay XX amount to trustee in order to keep the car. Basically an amount tht would be close to what they would get at auction, minus the exempted value of course. So your exemption is 3300 for car and car is appraised at 5K you can offer around 1.7K to keep it.