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- Hey everybody, John Skiba here. And in this video, I'm going to talk about one of the most difficult, worst things that you can deal with if you're facing debt and that is wage garnishment. I'm going to talk about some different ways to stop it, both bankruptcy and non-bankruptcy and how you can overall deal with this really difficult problem. But if this is your first time here to my YouTube channel, go ahead and click on the bell, click subscribe. That will you'll be notified each and every week when I provide new videos that help you deal with your serious debt problems. All right, let's talk about wage garnishment. Wage garnishment is the worst. I mean, obviously, we talk a lot of here in my YouTube channel about dealing with debt, dealing with these debt collection lawsuits. If you lose or if you allow it to go a debt collection lawsuit to go to a default judgment, once they are armed with that judgment, that's what the collector and the creditor is looking for because in most states, they can then garnish your wages. Like for instance, in Arizona where I practice, once a creditor has a judgment, they can garnish up to 25% of each paycheck. Having a full quarter of your pay every paycheck be taken out, there's very few people that can survive that financially. And so that ends up in a lot of bankruptcy filings and just a lot of heartache and difficulty. So in this episode or this video, I wanted to talk specifically about different ways to deal with it. Now I know that a lot of people say that the only way you can deal with it is through bankruptcy and I'm in agreement that bankruptcy is obviously the most powerful and the most immediate and I want to talk about that, but first I want to talk about some ways that you may be able to deal with the garnishment that can at least make it a little more tolerable, if not go away completely. Now, garnishment is, particularly wage garnishment, is very much a state thing. Every state has different laws associated with it. For instance like Texas does not have wage garnishment, at least not right now in 2020, which is always interesting to me that they don't, I don't know how collectors collect debt once they get a judgment because this is really the most powerful tool that the creditor and the collector have is wage garnishment. But in Arizona, and I'm going to speak specifically to Arizona. I know that most states have some sort of statutory process that's similar to what we do in Arizona. I don't know every different state, obviously, so I'm going to speak to what we do here in Arizona as it relates to wage garnishment and you can look in your state for something similar, but in Arizona, you're going to get hit with the wage garnishment. They'll provide a copy to your employer who then is required to provide a copy to you. Often I'll hear people say, hey, I had no idea this was coming. And all of a sudden they're going to take money out of my next paycheck. And unfortunately at least in Arizona, that's the way it plays out, that you get noticed in your very next paycheck, they're going to start withholding those funds. Now under Arizona law, you have 10 days to file an objection to that garnishment and that the court will actually set a hearing on that. Something that's important to know, two things actually that are important to know. One, just because you request a hearing, that does not mean that the garnishment will stop pending the outcome of that hearing. The creditor has sent an order to the employer where they're required to withhold your pay, but they don't transfer it over to the creditor or the junk debt buyer, whoever it is, who has the judgment. So they're getting those funds and they're holding them, but they're going to continue to do that until this whole process plays out. So once you raise your objection and you file a written objection with the court, they will set a hearing. Now under Arizona law, when you go to that hearing, the court is not going to address things like whether you were served properly or whether the underlying debt is valid. The court is going to assume that it's valid because a judgment has already been entered against you. That's why I always preach. You got to respond to those debt collection laws that you can't just let it go to a default, and then think that you'll deal with it later on, you got to respond to it because once a judgment is entered, you lose so many rights to be able to contest it. It makes it so much more difficult to unwind that process. But if you raise the objection, you'll go to the hearing, you're going to have to say that there's something wrong with the underlying process itself, with the way that they served your employer or that they've named a party that you're not the actual party, something like that. If you want to attack the underlying judgment, you're going to have to go in and file a motion to vacate the default judgment or the judgment that was entered against you. I have an online tutorial that can walk you through how that generally plays out. I'll put a link down in the comments below, but you've got to actually go in and file a motion to vacate. That whole process in Arizona, it takes probably six to eight weeks minimum. And so your wages are going to continue to be garnished while that's playing out. But if you're able to do that, then they're going to have to refund all the money. I mean, that's the flip side of that is if you're able to file a motion to vacate and you're successful to get that judgment vacated, then any funds that have already been garnished, they're going to have to be refunded back to you immediately because then there's no longer a garnishment to be able to do that. One of the things that Arizona does is Arizona does allow you to raise the issue of hardship. And if you can show that having 25% of your paycheck is a hardship on you, which I think most of us can, that would be pretty devastating to most people, in under Arizona law, they can reduce it down to a 15% garnishment, but no lower. The court is not going to say hey, it looks like this is going to make things pretty tight, we're just going to do away at the garnishment. Unfortunately, that's not an option. So you may be hearing that and thinking, hey, if I'm in Arizona, that doesn't sound so great. If I'm another state, it's likely to be something similar. I admit, the garnishment process, it's a very advanced remedy. And what I mean by that is that at that point, the court is saying, look, we have a final judgment. We're going to open up a whole different bunch of opportunities for this creditor to take things from you. The power is drastically shifted to the creditor at that point and you've lost almost all leverage. Often I'll have people call my office who have an active wage garnishment and say, hey, I want to try and settle this now. Well, you're probably going to have to settle for almost a full balance regardless of which type if it's a junk debt buyer, original creditor, because at this point they have all the leverage. They can say no, we're not going to settle. We're just going to take 25% of your pay every two weeks until the full thing is paid in full. So that's why, again, file an answer. If you've been sued, file a response or get this thing sell pretty quickly. You don't want to let it get to a default judgment because garnishment is a very difficult thing to stop and unwind. Unless, and let's talk about the second thing here and this is why so many people lead to bankruptcy once they end up with a garnishment is because that process is cumbersome, it's difficult to prevail on talking about the garnishment process. It's difficult to prevail on that and even if you have good facts and the law on your side, it's going to take a couple months minimum to stop that. In the meantime, your family's being hit by that garnishment. Bankruptcy, whether it's chapter seven, chapter 13, no matter which bankruptcy you're filing, as soon as you file that case with the court, it will immediately stop the wage garnishment. Not only that, you can do what's called an emergency bankruptcy filing. Typically the normal bankruptcy filing is like 70 to 90 pages of information. It takes a long time for bankruptcy attorneys like myself to draft all of that. But the court allows us just to submit the first few pages which they really just have your name, address, social security number and the fact that you're filing bankruptcy. We can file that with the court, stop the wage garnishment immediately. I mean, literally I have clients come in that are dealing with something like that, we can stop it within 24 hours. It'll stop the wage garnishment and then they'll give you a couple of weeks to submit everything out so you have a little bit more time to get it done. The bankruptcy will also discharge the underlying debt so you're not having to deal with this down the road. The one thing it won't do is if they've already garnished a bunch of money from you, you're not going to get that back. The bankruptcy court may go and try to get those funds and distribute them in a more pro-rata version to all of your creditors, but you're not going to get those funds back, but it is a way to stop it, just to stop the bleeding there and deal with the debt once and for all. So I hope that helps and gives you a little bit of clarity on garnishment. Again, the best thing there is just to try to avoid getting in that situation where there's a judgment altogether and deal with it, whether through contesting a lawsuit or trying to settle it, or even looking at a chapter seven bankruptcy from the beginning so that you're not put in that very difficult spot. Thanks for watching today.