District rule

Buying a Car During Chapter 13 in New Mexico

Written by JaredLast reviewed 2026-08-25

Does the District of New Mexico trustee have to approve a car loan during Chapter 13?

Yes, with one narrow exception carved out by dollar amount. Local Rule 3015-6 — formally "Application to Incur Non-Emergency New Debt in Chapter 13 Cases" — is the District of New Mexico's local answer to the requirement described on this site's Chapter 13 car-loan pillar page: that new debt during an active plan generally needs advance permission under 11 U.S.C. §§ 1305(c), 1322(a)(1), and 1327, because the plan already commits the debtor's income to creditors. New Mexico's rule doesn't require a court order for most requests. It builds a trustee-only approval track first and reserves the judge for the cases the trustee turns down or ignores.

Is there a dollar threshold that needs no approval at all?

Yes — $1,000 a year, aggregated across everything. Local Rule 3015-6(a) states: "The debtor may incur non-mortgage consumer debt of less than $1,000 in the aggregate in any calendar year without seeking approval of the trustee or the court." That's an aggregate figure, not a per-purchase one: a debtor who takes on $600 in one piece of consumer debt and $500 in another during the same calendar year has crossed the threshold on the second one, even though neither purchase alone reached $1,000. A car loan of any meaningful size will clear this floor on its own, so the de minimis exception mostly matters for small purchases, not vehicle financing.

How do you request trustee approval above that threshold?

By writing directly to the trustee, not by filing anything in court. Local Rule 3015-6(b)(1) opens this trustee-only path "if the debtor seeks to incur non-mortgage consumer debt that will not affect payments under the plan or the dividend to unsecured creditors," and it's explicit that the application itself stays out of the case file: "The debtor shall not file the application in the bankruptcy case." Subsection (b)(2) lists exactly what the application must contain: proposed amended Schedules I and J, or a certified statement that income and expenses haven't changed since confirmation, or that I and J were filed within the previous 12 months; a description of the item being purchased; a description of any collateral; the debtor's reasons for the purchase; the loan's principal balance, interest rate, monthly payments, and maturity date; and a certification that the new debt won't affect plan feasibility, plan payments, or the dividend to unsecured creditors.

What are the three outcomes under Local Rule 3015-6?

Does New Mexico cap the loan amount, the payment, or the interest rate?

No — none of the three. Local Rule 3015-6 requires the application to disclose "the principal balance, interest rate, monthly payments, maturity date, and any other relevant financing terms," but it sets no ceiling on any of them. Instead of a numeric cap, the rule uses a feasibility standard: the debtor must certify the new debt "will not affect plan feasibility, payments under the plan, or the dividend to unsecured creditors," and trustee approval turns on that certification and the debtor's budget, not on a published dollar or rate limit. That's a different model from districts that publish hard numbers — the Chapter 13 pillar page walks through one Texas-area trustee's form that currently caps loan amount, payment, and interest rate directly. New Mexico's local rule doesn't do that.

What happens if the trustee denies the request, or never responds?

The debtor can go to court. Local Rule 3015-6(b)(4) gives two triggers for that option: "If the trustee denies the application or does not notify the debtor of the trustee's decision within a reasonable time, debtor may file a motion to incur the proposed debt and give the required notice." The rule doesn't attach a day count to "reasonable time" — no fixed turnaround window is published here, unlike districts that give the trustee a specific number of days to object once a motion is filed. If the trustee does approve at the trustee-only stage, the debtor still has to act in the case: Local Rule 3015-6(b)(3) requires filing "a notice of the trustee's approval" within 10 days, disclosing the item purchased, the debt amount, any collateral, the monthly payment, and the maturity date.

One more constraint applies after the fact. Local Rule 3015-6(c) blocks the debtor from later using a plan modification to cut what unsecured creditors get paid, if that modification is "necessitated in whole or in part by the new debt incurred and approved only by the trustee" through this process — trustee-only approval isn't a route to quietly reducing the dividend down the line.

Must the debtor be current on plan payments, or have an attorney sign the request?

The rule's text doesn't say, and this page isn't going to guess. Local Rule 3015-6 lists what the application must contain — amended schedules or a certification, a description of the item and any collateral, the debtor's reasons, the financing terms, and a feasibility certification — but nowhere states that plan payments must be current or that debtor's counsel must sign. Other standing trustees' offices publish their own current-on-payments or attorney-signature requirements as office practice layered on top of a similarly bare local rule; New Mexico's standing trustee, Tiffany M. Cornejo, may do the same without it appearing in the rule itself, but nothing on the trustee's own public forms page states such a requirement in writing. A debtor should confirm directly with the trustee's office whether either condition applies in practice, rather than assuming the rule's silence means neither exists.

Where does this rule come from, and how current is the version quoted here?

From the district's own Local Rules of Bankruptcy Procedure, most recently revised 12.1.2025 — and this particular rule is brand new. The document states its own effective date directly: "The effective date of these rules is December 1, 2025," following amendments in 2017, 2019, 2021, and 2023 to rules first adopted November 15, 2014. Local Rule 3015-6 is not one of the rules carried forward from those earlier editions. The March 1, 2023 version of the same rulebook runs 3015-1 through 3015-4 and then goes straight to 3017-1, and the word "incur" appears nowhere in it; the same is true of the 2016, 2017, and 2019 editions the court still posts. The court adopted this rule in an order captioned "ORDER ADOPTING AMENDED AND NEW LOCAL RULES OF THE UNITED STATES BANKRUPTCY COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF NEW MEXICO EFFECTIVE DECEMBER 1, 2025" (No. MP 25-001-j, Robert H. Jacobvitz), after a public comment period that expired September 30, 2025 — the order records that "No comments were received."

Local Rule 3015-6 sits inside the current rulebook in the part covering claims objections, plan confirmation, and distribution. Its newness cuts both ways: there is no superseded version of this rule to confuse it with, but there is also no published track record of how the trustee's office reads "a reasonable time" in practice, because the rule has only been operative since December 2025. Rules like this one change over time without individual notice to filers — the pillar page's Texas-area example shows one trustee's own numbers moving from one form revision to the next — so the text quoted above is worth re-checking against the court's own local rules page or a current attorney before relying on it. See why a single national timeline for this process is wrong for the fuller case against generic day-count claims, and the motion-to-incur-debt glossary entry for how this fits the broader Chapter 13 framework.

This page describes the text of Local Rule 3015-6 as published by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Mexico. It is not legal advice, and it isn't a substitute for asking a bankruptcy attorney or the standing trustee's office what a specific case requires.