Can Bankruptcy Help You In Oklahoma?

Video Transcribed:  Oklahoma City Bankruptcy Attorney Edward Kelley with 888-DEBTLINE. We are finishing up our series today on how to save your home and or car in bankruptcy. So just going to do an overview. We went into detail in the last four videos.

Again, if you are behind on your house, even if you’re in the last gasps of a foreclosure, as long as the motion to sell, meaning at auction, your house has not occurred, you can stop it with the filing of a chapter 13 bankruptcy.

However, what’s going to happen is you’re going to have to immediately submit a plan proposing to pay the regular mortgage payment plus all of the arrearage spread out over at a maximum of 60 months or five years including interest rolled into that but it will be a set amount and if you have the ability to pay that, you’ll have to pay it voluntarily until it’s confirmed by the court, which generally will happen if the trustee has no objection and no creditors have any objections and they can’t just object because they don’t want to do it.

They’d have to have wrong numbers or some kind of unfair treatment. You’d have to make sure that everything was paid until the confirmation and then the trustee would make the payments for you from that point on.

Same thing with the car except, and we’re going to talk about it in the next series, starting with the next video, special powers of bankruptcy.

In a car, you may be able to cram down the amount you owe down to the fair market value of the car. But again, any arrearage that remains will need to be paid through the plan, maximum of 60 months and if your house is in trouble, you’ve got to take care of both within that 60 months and the regular car payment. So again, as long as the car hasn’t been repossessed, it’s a little different with cars, they generally just come take it.

So if they’ve got it, you’re kind of out of luck. If they don’t have it, you can file that and you just got to make sure that creditor is aware of that automatic stay. Although if they repoed it after filing, they’re in violation of that.

So the key here is get it filed in time and have the money to do it, or it’s just probably going to be a waste of time because if your case gets dismissed or you convert to a seven then they have a right to that collateral if it’s not paid up, which presumably it wasn’t if you were in that 13.

So that’s how to save your house or car in a bankruptcy and next step we’ll be talking about special powers in bankruptcy. It’d be some crossover from this series that you’ll learn more about what you can do. There’s a lot of things you may not be aware of. So as always, you can get ahold of me at 1-888-DEBT LINE or edward@wirthlawoffice.com,  and on Facebook at Oklahomans for debt relief. Talk to you soon.