Chapter 13 vehicle loan cramdown solves a number of serious practical problems that even Chapter 7 “straight bankruptcy” can’t.

Chapter 13 REALLY Helps with Vehicle Loans

The laws about the treatment of different types of creditors can often be used in your favor to pay who you want or need to pay.

Your Chapter 13 payment plan has to treat debts that are legally the same type of debts essentially the same way. But your plan can and must treat different types of debts quite differently. The laws related to this can be used to your advantage in many, many ways. Today we begin showing how this works with each of the three major types of debts.

Chapter 13 is very different from Chapter 7 “straight bankruptcy.” It buys you time to deal effectively with your special debts.

The Main Overall Benefit of Chapter 13

The main benefit of Chapter 7 “straight bankruptcy” is the discharge—legal write off—of your debts.

You can file a Chapter 13 case if you are an “individual,” have “regular income,” and don’t owe too much.

If you qualify, a Chapter 13 case is an extraordinarily powerful tool for dealing with certain kinds of debts. For example:

If you owe “priority” debts like income taxes and/or support payments, you may be able to pay no more to protect a transferee.

Let’s follow up on something we said in our last blog post two days ago. We showed how you can use a Chapter 13 “adjustment of debts” case to resolve a fraudulent transfer. Essentially, you pay extra into your Chapter 13 payment plan to make up for doing the fraudulent transfer. In the example we used, the debtor would pay a $225/month plan payment for about 22 extra months to make up for the $5,000 vehicle he or she’d had given away a year before filing bankruptcy.