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Judgment Enforcement – The Step-by-Step Course
SPECIAL NOTE: The JC’s often have good information too. When
you speak to the creditor, he or she will likely have information about the
debtor. It may be a neighbor, former friend, boss, client, ex-spouse, or at
least someone they met up with in court after an auto accident. Often a creditor is overly
optimistic about the debtor’s assets because they want you to take the assignment.
Sometimes creditors are not trustworthy, such as when they claim he’s hiding money in the
Caymans or they know he bought a new Lexus, when in fact it’s leased.
JC’s are often so upset that they imagine all sorts of things about the debtor. Or, like I
said, they make them up to get us to take the judgment. Our task is to find out what we can
from the JC, but not trust all of it. Some of it may be really good.
DISCOVERING THE MINUSES – What to look for on my database
— Hard time finding the JD: If you have to work to find the JD, it’s likely not a good
judgment. Everyone with a job, car, boat, bank account, home, etc., is findable in the
databases. Yes, everyone. If there is no recent address for a JD, then he’s on someone’s
couch, skipped the country, or in a shack in Montana like the Unabomber. The mob may
have gotten him too. Not a good bet for enforcement.
— Consumer Judgments: This is big, big, big. I’ll say more about this later,
but the short of it is that you don’t want consumer judgments. What are they?
They are judgments from a credit transaction for personal, family, and
household purposes. (On the Forum I give a whole long list of these). Think
credit card debt, most often. You don’t want those. Why not? Because then you fall under
the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act (FDCPA) and some of the rules change, and you
open yourself to lawsuits (valid or not) from unscrupulous debtors. In 18 years in the
business, I don’t think I’ve ever taken a consumer-related judgment, and I wasn’t event
trying to avoid them. But I do avoid them. Again: Much more on this later. Also, a very
important lesson about this on the Forum Learning Annex, Lesson #3
— Multiple Evictions: It’s a big minus if multiple evictions show up for the JD on the
databases. We pay for food first, then rent. If the JD can’t even pay his rent, you can
figure that he’s broke, unemployed, taking the bus or driving a heap, sleeping someone’s
couch, and other things you can imagine. He may be poor, or he may be the loser our
parents warned us about. Not only should we not marry the person, don’t take the
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