Business Finance Marketing

Garnishment of wages or a bank account can be embarrassing. But, when you fail to pay a creditor a debt that you owe him, garnishment is one of the weapons that he can use against you.

A bank account garnishment differs from a wage garnishment in that it is a one time deal. This means that they have one chance to remove the money from your bank account. For example, if your debt amount is $500, the creditor may legally take any amount up to $500 from that account.

If the account has only $400 of non-exempt funds in it, they make take the entire $400. They may not come back, however, at a later time to collect the remaining $100. If they want to do that, they will have to go through the court process again to garnish the remaining amount.

Many times when a debt collector is attempting to collect money from you, he will threaten to garnish your paycheck. Most of the time this is an empty threat as a collector cannot implement wage garnishment on his own. Before he can do this, he must first sue you and take your to court.

And even when he gets you to court, there’s no guarantee that the judge will rule that your salary be garnished. Given the choice, debt collectors don’t like to spend time in court. Most are paid in commissions. And they’d much rather spend their time on the phone threatening you and collecting money than arguing their case in court.

But, if your check is garnished, you can stop garnishment at any time by simply paying the Clerk’s office and giving the receipt to your employer.