People are often nervous about the Vancouver, Washington Chapter 13 Bankruptcy Meeting of the Creditors. The real source of this anxiety is that they have no idea what to expect.
If you file a Chapter 13 Bankruptcy Petition in Washington and your hearing is set for Vancouver, Washington will want you to complete and submit a Trustee Information Sheet to your Bankruptcy attorney.
Failure to complete the Washington Chapter 13 Bankruptcy Trustee Information Sheet may result in your hearing being continued to a later date.
If you file a chapter 13 bankruptcy petition in Washington or Oregon, your plan payment will be made through wage garnishment instead of a direct payment. Both the Portland and Vancouver Chapter 13 Trustees will insist on it. As much as you might be uncomfortable with this intrusion, having your Chapter 13 payment f come directly out of your check will greatly increase your success rate. Direct payment will force you to budget in order to make it through your chapter 13 bankruptcy.
People often truly believe that they can successfully budget and make the monthly payment to the chapter 13 trustee. More often than not life gets in the way and a debtor will pay everything else first. When something really important comes up, the Chapter 13 plan payment does not get made because there is no money left at the end of the month. At some point the Portland or Vancouver Chapter 13 Bankruptcy Trustee will file a Motion to Dismiss for Failure to Pay.
If you are living in either the Portland or Vancouver and you decide to move out of state, there should be no impact on your Chapter 13 Bankruptcy, provided that you keep making your mandatory payments to the Chapter 13 Trustee.
You will want to provide your Portland or Vancouver Chapter 13 Bankruptcy Attorney with your new address and phone number as quickly as possible. In addition, if you are paying the Trustee by wage order, you will also need to provide your new employment information so that a new wage order can be put in place as quickly as possible.
In both Oregon and Washington, you can under certain circumstances reduce the amount that you have to pay back to your car lender by filing a Chapter 13 Bankruptcy. This can obviously represent a huge savings to many debtors in the Vancouver and Portland metro areas.
Generally speaking, as long as the car loan is at least 910 days old, you can reduce the amount you pay back from the actual contract amount owing at the time of the of filing your Chapter 13 Petition to the resale value of your vehicle.
The most immediate result of missing your mortgage payment during your Oregon Chapter 13 is the filing of a Motion For Relief From Stay by your lender’s attorney.
A Motion For Relief From Stay, if granted by the Portland Bankruptcy Court, enables your lender to foreclose on the property during your Chapter 13 Bankruptcy because of your missed payments. If you get this Motion in the mail, you should immediately contact your attorney. In Oregon, a settlement can often be reached with the lender’s attorney so that the lender does not foreclose. Usually this means that any missed payments are cured within six months, providing ongoing monthly mortgage payments are made in the future.
David Howe is the Chapter 13 Bankruptcy Trustee for Vancouver, Tacoma and all parts of Washington in between. Contact information for the Vancouver, Chapter 13 Bankruptcy Trustee is as follows:
Office Hours: 7:00 am - 12:00 pm and 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm Monday - Friday
No later than two weeks before your Portland Chapter 13 Creditors Meeting, the Chapter 13 Bankruptcy Trustee requires the following items:
1.) Any documents showing the last sixty days worth of income including pay stubs, 401k distributions, documentation of unemployment, pension payments and so on.
