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If your car debt situation isn’t working for you, bankruptcy can provide you with opportunities to do some pretty great things to improve your situation. Under the bankruptcy code, interest rates and monthly car payments can often be lowered. Under some circumstances, the amount that you now owe on the car can be reduced as well. Plus if you are behind on a car loan, bankruptcy can make your vehicle safe and remove the need for you to come up with a ton of money to catch up. This is great news for many Oregonians because more and more, car debts have become a real problem.
Next to the mortgage and student loans, the car loan is normally your biggest debt ticket item. The average vehicle cost is now roughly $33,500. With car lenders extending car purchase loans to 6 years or more, and factoring in even the lowest of interest rates, you can easily find yourself owing $50,000 just to be able to drive to work.
Unlike mortgages which are at least tied to assets that rise in value, car loans are tied to assets that start to lose their value the moment they are given off the lot. The fact is that if you finance your vehicle over 4 to 6 years, you will probably owe more on it than it is worth until the third or fourth year of the contract.
If you do want to keep a car and you have a bad interest rate, Chapter 13 Bankruptcy will normally allow you to reduce the interest rate on your loan such that you pay no more than five percent interest on the remainder of your car debt. Play around with a debt calculator for a while and see how many thousands of dollars this could potentially save you.
If your want to keep your car but you are behind on it, Chapter 13 Bankruptcy can remove the worry about having to catch up. Your car will be placed in your plan and paid off over three to five years. In other words being behind no longer matters as long as you agree to pay off the car over that time period.
If your car is worth less than what you owe and you financed the car more than 910 days ago, Chapter 13 will enable you to reduce the amount of your loan to what the car is actually worth. This can often result in a savings of thousands of dollars.
What if you already have a great interest rate, your car is worth more than what you owe on it and your current? What if you just don’t like the amount of your car payment? Chapter 13 will enable you to stretch the car loan out over five years. This often means that rather than pay $500 a month or more on your car and all your other creditors on top of it, you pay, say, $300 a month to deal with all your creditors and the car.
If you have debt problems and part of that debt problem is your car loan talk to us today. Many of our clients let a car go before seeing us, not realizing that they could have kept the car and paid less on it every month. Let’s talk it through first and see what kind of options you have.
Set an appointment at one of our offices in Portland, Salem or Vancouver. If time is tight feel free to set a phone or video appointment right on the website. I am always happy to discuss the benefits of bankruptcy for Oregonians in bad car loans.
The post HOW TO MAKE YOUR CAR DEAL BETTER IN BANKRUPTCY appeared first on Portland Bankruptcy Attorney | Northwest Debt Relief.

If you are behind on your mortgage, you can use Chapter 13 to stop a pending foreclosure and repay missed payments over the 5 year term of your Chapter 13 plan. However, filing your Chapter 13 case is only the first step in saving your home.
In Atlanta area Chapter 13 cases, your repayment plan will include a section which says that you agree to send in your regular mortgage payments as they come due during the term of your Chapter 13 plan. Your Chapter 13 trustee payment includes payments to the mortgage company to repay missed payment. Ongoing, future payments, must be paid directly to the mortgage company outside your plan.Making your mortgage payments directly to your mortgage lender is part of your plan obligations.  Both your mortgage payment obligation and your obligation to pay your trustee start immediately after you file your case.  In fact, you will not be able to get your Chapter 13 case confirmed (approved) by the judge if your post-petition mortgage payments are not up to date.During the course of your case, if you fail to send in your ongoing monthly mortgage payments, several bad things will happen. First, there is a good chance that your mortgage lender will file a Motion for Relief from Stay and ask the bankruptcy judge to lift bankruptcy protection so the lender can restart foreclosure proceedings.Second, your options to save your home will all but disappear.  Once a motion for relief has been filed, you cannot voluntarily dismiss your Chapter 13 and then refile – if you dismiss, you will not be allowed to refile for 180 days – plenty of time for the lender to complete a foreclosure sale.Fortunately, most lenders will negotiate with you and your lawyer to allow you to catch up your delinquent post-filing mortgage payments. Obviously this will require cash flow but it is another opportunity to save your house.Chapter 13 can be very confusing because of all the technical rules. The one thing that makes Chapter 13 work is money – payments to your Chapter 13 trustee and direct payments to your mortgage lender.The post Why You Must Pay Your Mortgage Directly After Filing Chapter 13 appeared first on theBKBlog.