No. The minimum period of time a bankruptcy will take to be administered is 9 months. However, if you have performed your duties and paid the required contributions and surplus income and neither the court/trustee or creditors object to the discharge, then you could receive an automatic discharge after 9 months if it is the first time you’ve filed for bankruptcy.
Simply put, surplus income is the governments way of saying ’someone who makes $5000 per month will have to pay more to file for bankruptcy than someone that makes $3000 per month’. The thresholds that determine if surplus income would be required are based on the size of your family.
The trustee has an obligation to inform the court of substantial surplus income during the bankruptcy. The typical line of reasoning is that if you have substantial surplus income payments to make during bankruptcy, you probably would have been in a position to avoid a bankruptcy by at least offering a proposal. So typically, if no surplus income was required during the bankruptcy the trustee reports as such and in that regard and the bankrupt could receive the automatic discharge if all the other bankrupts duties were performed.
On the other hand – an extreme example however would be that, if you make $10,000 and you choose to go bankrupt, the courts could decide that at the time of filing the bankruptcy, you had the income to file a viable proposal or avoid bankruptcy by paying for the debts. As such the courts could keep the bankruptcy open for as long as needed to be in order to repay all the debt.
There is no technical limit for which the court can impose an extension to the 9 month period.
So, although typically many bankrupts qualify for an automatic discharge at the end of 9 months, in our experience, with that kind of income, there is a more than small chance that your bankruptcy would be extended for a longer period of time.
If you have questions regarding this article, bankruptcy or surplus income, please call me at 519 622 3773 or email me your questions.
