What is a Pay Advice?
A pay advice is any document that provides written evidence of your income.
The most obvious example of a pay advice is a pay stub, but a pay advice can also be a printout of your income and withholding from your employer. In fact, more and more often I will have clients that bring in a pay advice that they were able to download directly from their employer’s Human Resources website.
Why do you need to produce your Pay Advices?
You must produce your pay advices for two primary reasons: 1) The pay advice is used to calculate your Current Monthly Income for the purposes of the Means Test, and, 2) Your payment advice is produced to the Trustee in your bankruptcy.
How many pay advices are needed to file a bankruptcy?
You need to produce pay advices for the six month period leading up to the filing of your bankruptcy. As an example if you were going to file in December of 2009, you would need to provide your attorney with your pay advices for the months of June 2009 through November of 2009. If you are filing with a spouse then both spouses must produce their pay advices.
You also provide the pay advices for the 60 days before your filing to the Trustee that is assigned to your case.
What if I don’t have or can’t find my pay advices?
If you don’t have pay advices because you were paid in cash or perhaps were self employed, then the Court will usually accept a sworn statement regarding the lack of pay advices, but you may also be required to produce additional information such as profit and loss statements to satisfy the Trustee and the Court that all income is being reported.
If you can’t find your pay advices, then it will be necessary to go to your employer and request a printout of your earnings or other documentation of your income.
What if I am unemployed and don’t have pay advices?
If you were unemployed, then a sworn statement that you were unemployed during the six months leading up to the filing of your bankruptcy will usually be sufficient.
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