Requirements for Consumer Proposal?
Hello,
My wife and I are thinking of doing a consumer proposal as we are having financial problems. We had our first meeting with a trustee and showed them the income we made etc…Now my wife is currently just starting a daycare and only has one kid so her income is not very high. It`s mainly mine but still not enough to pay the growing amounts of credit card bills. The trustee told us we need to generate some more money before we can go for a consumer proposal. Is this true? I have no idea how long to wait until we can make more money. And the more time we wait the more interest gets added to our monthly credit card bills. Please help.
Thank you
Posted from: Ontario
I think you may have misunderstood the trustee. You don’t need to make more money in order to qualify to file a consumer proposal (there are no income rules that have to be met), BUT you have to have enough money coming in to afford a reasonable proposal payment. If you can’t pay your monthly living expenses then you won’t have any money available to make proposal payment. I suspect that is the problem.
If you are confident that the family’s income will increase you can file a proposal with smaller payments in the first year, and increasing payments in each subsequent year. That might solve your cashflow problem right now (of course you have to offer them something…)
At the end of the day, the only real condition is that your creditors have to agree to your payment plan.