This is wearing me down!

[tightgrip]

Are any of you going month by month to try to pass the means. Meaning you are having your attorney/paralegal recalculate at the beginning of every month? I am sooo sick of dealing with this I seriously feel we were scammed out of 2200 dollars because I am having to be the aggressor and make sure things are done! The attorney tells us to wait till May to recalculate thru April but how come they dont recalculate thru March first? I finally just emailed the paralegal who is putting together our petition and aksed her if that last calculation was thru March and she said no its thru February but first I have to have your pay stubs. Well we gave the pay stubs to the attorney on Monday . . . . RRRRRR . . . . I am beyond frustrated at this point! I paid 2200 and really have gotten no legal advice that has helped. I should be paying you all on here!! I called about getting my money back and I am "possibly" entitled to is 300 out of 2200 I about died at that point but there went the 300 after the phone call. I set up another consultation with another attorney on the 9th but I am almost thinking we can not afford another. We paid in full with our tax refund and I know we can't slide another 2 grand out! Maybe I should just file on my own! Everyone else is doing it! I think I could possibly be able to do it!! Any words of advice?

[keepinitreal]

Do you have any way of knowing the dollar amounts on the pay stubs you already gave to your attorney? If you do, you could enter the numbers in a spreadsheet yourself, and calculate the "rolling" 6-month averages. This only works if you can "guesstimate" your future months' numbers because your pay doesn't change much paycheck-to-paycheck.

If you can enter your own gross income numbers into a spreadsheet by month, you can predict which 6-month period in the future you will be under the median and then possibly be able to file Chapter 7 the following month.

Good luck!

[Ann]

tightgrip, we are in the exact same boat you are in... in fact it is almost identical. Not that you have the time(or even would want to) just look at some of my postings this past week in the chapter 7 topic here and in collections. You will see the nightmare I have been living. Yes, we too spent our income tax refund only to be told we don't qualify just yet... I know what you are going through and I totally understand where you are coming from.

[gmk]

I did the sames thing as keepinitreal suggested, a spreadsheet going back w' actual and going forward with reasonable estimates. To actually fall under the median we were a six month wait. My attorney was a you must fall under the median type. I also did the means test for each month going forward.

My march means test numbers came out very good in my favor, as did the I & J schedules for an April filing so I packed up my numbers and all the required info (pay stubs, bank statements, etc) and took them into the law office. I also brought in a completed means test as an example. The paralegal completed the paperwork, the attorney reviewed it and we're filing in a couple of days Attorney said it's good to go.

In order to pass the means test there were assumptions that I believed were OK in our district, IE: car ownership with cars that are free and clear and the house payment while we're surrendering the house. Apparently these are OK with the atty so we pass and away we go.

TBS, I think it's a given that if you can fall under the median, that's he surest way to go, if you can tough it out til then. We just missed our third mortgage payment so the foreclosure clock is starting to tick, a local debt collector for a hospital is just about to sue (I think) and we want to move from the area so our motivation was sooner than later is better for our plans. If it turned out we had to wait a couple of months we would have but we wouldn't have liked it.

I commiserate, the waiting game is stressful and not much fun.

As an aside, be very scrupulous when you review the paperwork before signing. There were numerous omissions and questions I had about certain entries. I took the petition home for a thorough review and I'm glad I did, my medical creditors were omitted from the matrix. Yowch.

Good luck, I feel your pain.