Free and clear, yet not: the conditional discharge

Well, as of October 9th, we are done "our time" in the bankruptcy process. Sort of.

When this all started, the trustees did a lien search, and nothing showed up.

So, the monthly payment we had to make was based on how much we owed, what liquid assets we had and our monthly income. "Unnecessary" things were a part of the total; for example, any collections we had, if we did not want to sell them, we had to "buy them back" and that was worked into the monthly payment.

All these payments were equalized, so that at the end of the 9 months, all would be paid off.

Or so we thought.

A couple of months into this, one of our creditors sent a letter to our trustees basically saying "nuh-uh - they can't not pay us; they signed over their car, here's a copy of what they agreed to. Make them continue paying us."

After the initial panic was over, our trustees sent a letter back saying "nuh-uh, you can't take the car or make them pay because YOU guys forgot to file this with the government and pay the filing fee."

Freed on a technicality.

However, because we DID sign the document, the car somehow became an additional asset (can't completely remember why it was not counted before, but it was all paid for, and worth under a certain amount, so it was not put towards anything), and as such, it, too, had to be "bought back."

Since the payments we were making already stretched us to the limit of what we could afford, we couldn't make the deadline for a full discharge by paying more each month.

So, while we have made it through the 9 months of monthly income and expense reporting/accountability, we are not done.

Good news is, once we hit 2005, there will be more vacation time available to cash in...

We will be celebrating New Years a lot this year.