Steps To Wage Garnishment
When a debtor falls behind on their credit card bills, aggressive collections actions such as wage garnishment don’t happen overnight. The road to wage garnishment and asset seizures often takes months or even years. Below are the steps a creditor takes before they garnish your wages.
- The creditor will begin calling you at home or work when you are 60 – 90 days delinquent on your payments. This is especially true for credit card accounts that are delinquent. The phone calls and letters can be relentless and in rare cases cross over into the realm of abuse. When this happens you will have legal remedy to make them stop and even receive compensation depending on the severity of the abuse.
- After about 90 days the original creditor will give up on any hope that they can get the money, cut their losses and sell the debt to a third-party debt collector who will do exactly with the original creditor did in the first 90 days of your account being delinquent. They will call you non-stop for about 90 days; but the good thing is that at this point you can tell them to stop calling you and they are legally required to stop.
- Once 180 days have passed since you stopped paying your credit card, an attorney will become involved. Eventually, the attorney will file a lawsuit against you in an attempt to win a judgment. This judgment will give the creditor the power to issue a wage garnishment, to garnish bank accounts and in general force the debtor to pay the debt with the force of the law.
If a debtor fails to take action such as filing bankruptcy after or before a creditor wins a judgment against them, it will be virtually impossible to stop the wage garnishment. Employers are required by law to honor a wage garnishment order and failure to do so could land them in legal trouble.
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