Pacifica, CA Bankruptcy Law Firms & Lawyers

Your educational loans are generally not dischargeable, nor is your child support obligation. Credit cards and other unsecured debt, however, may be dischargeable. Your number one issue, however, is that you likely do not qualify for a chapter 7 bankruptcy as you are well over the median income. A chapter 13 filing may allow you to get a handle on your debt however, and the court does have authority to convert your chapter 13 to a 7 if it believes it is appropriate to do so.

If you qualified for Chapter 7 when you filed the Chapter 13 case, you can just go ahead and convert to Chapter 7. In Southern California, you do it by using a form notice no motion is required.

While a homestead exemption may cover your RV, you are not asking the right question. Exemptions are designed to protect any equity you may have in an asset, so that a bankruptcy trustee or judgment creditor may not take it to satisfy claims. Exemptions are meaningless with regard to a secured creditor's interest in the asset. You do not have any equity in the RV, so there is nothing to protect by use of an exemption, and the bankruptcy trustee would have no interest in it in any event, since the loan balance exceeds its value. Even if you did have equity in it, you cannot use an exemption to wipe out the secured creditor's lien rights. It could be worth $40,000 and you may only owe $10,000 on it, but if you stop making the payments, the creditor would still have the right to repossess it, regardless of whether you are living in it.