Let’s say an individual finds a debt objectionable and wants to pay it in the most offensive manor possible.
So they use a marker like some stores do to mark larger bills and write out the dozens on every dollar bill used to pay, as well as their critique of the receiver’s religion, nationality, sports team, preferred operating system, and soft drink preference.
I’m told if you refuse payment for a debt it becomes void. Is this true? Could you force someone to either discharge your debt or receive notes about how promiscuous their mother was?
As long as the bill is still fit to be circulated, no come has been committed. I’ve never looked to hard to find the exact defintion, but I presume that as long as you can still tell what the bill is without straining to hard, you’re probably in the clear. IOW, writing “LINUX IS STOOPID” on a twenty with a magic marker, isn’t going to have the SS knocking at your door.
That’s talking about pre-debt, though. I can tell you I won’t sell you something for US Dollars, but if you owe me a debt, I can’t tell you that I only accept gold, f’rinstance.
The real question seems to be, at what point does a bill become ‘unfit for circulation’? All of the examples listed involve altering the physical structure, not just writing on. Given that banks regularly recirculate bills with small amounts of writing, I very much doubt that the Secret Service considers any writing to be defacement. However, I don’t know if covering both sides would count. I doubt there’s much precedent, so you might have to sue to find out.
There was a thread about this a while back. But the issue is (and I don’t think it was resolved then), this mentions payment goods and services, and very specifically NOT debts.
Ignoring the defaced currency issue (which I agree with posters above you don’t have to accept), if you want to pay off your mortgage with a truck load quarters I’m not sure they could refuse to accept it.
Remember interest is due on debts, if the guy you owe has the right to refuse legitimate currency as payment, he can keep quibbling (“$50s ? I don’t take those!”. “You expect me to count all those singles!?”), and keep charging you interest.
Each Federal Reserve Bank has machines that are used to sort, count, and bundle currency. Those machines also catch bills that are worn, torn, tattered, faded, and otherwise unfit for circulation – including bills that have excessive markings on them. I don’t know that there is an exact definition of this (and even so I doubt that the Fed would actually release this info); it probably depends on the setting on each machine.
But bills don’t go through these Federal Reserve machines all that often any more – banks tend to keep the currency in-house (there are costs involved in dealing through the Fed). And most banks have their own bill counting machines nowadays, so they just count bills and re-issue bundles of them through their tellers. When I worked at a large bank chain, they frequently transferred bundles of bills between branches as needed, but tried to avoid going to or from the Fed.
So as long a a marked-up bill is still able to go thru the local branch bank’s counting machine (which will be much less exacting than the Federal Reserve machines), it can float around in circulation for quite a while. But eventually it will probably get to the Fed machines, and ‘excessively marked-up’ ones will be caught there.
Of course, any teller, cashier, or other person dealing with the money could shortcut this. Seeing a bill marked up with offensive or racist markings, any cashier could just say “we can’t take that bill”, or if the person had nothing else to pay with, they would accept it but the business would be sure to not give that bill out to any customer as change. And a bank teller would accept it, but put it with the collection of ‘damaged’ bills that will be sent to the Fed for replacement.
A while back (early 1990’s) some gay activists were encouraging people to rubber stamp “Gay Money” & a triangle in red on their money, supposedly to remind businesses of their gay customers. This small marking certainly didn’t make the bill unrecognizable nor render it unable to be circulated, but it bothered some conservative businesses, who refused to accept the bills. That brought more publicity to the campaign, which is probably not what those businesses wanted. (They would have been smarter to have quietly accepted the bills, then had their bank send them to the Fed for replacements – that would have go the bills out of circulation faster.)
Recently, there have been reports of “No God but Allah” rubber stamped on bills just below the printed “In God We Trust” on the bills. Some people are very upset about this, and refuse to handle those bills. (Maybe some of the same conservative businesses?) This kind of semi-defacement of currency seems to have been around for a while.
Decades ago, my mom and a bunch of her hippie friends paid all their taxes in singles, and wrote on each and every bill what they wanted that dollar spent on. I don’t think anyone made a fuss about it. Then again, though, I’m not sure any human ever saw any of those bills, either.
So the store doesn’t have to take paper money, or $2 bills, or pennies. But can they accept $2 bills in general, but refuse the $2 bill I’ve written “thanks for the blowjob – <3 Hershele” on provided you can tell it’s a $2 bill?
Refusing payment doesn’t automatically repudiate the debt. For example, I could refuse payment in cash because you owe me $100,000 and I’d rather have it wired to my account.
Think of it this way: In the end, the lender is going to take the debtor to court. The court will hear how infantile the debtor behaved, and how the debtor now claims he isn’t in debt because the lender refused to take the insulting notes. (Although the lender was more than willing to take payment with other non-defaced notes).
The court will not only declare that the debt still is owed, but will then take the debtor out in the back and slap them silly.
This smacks of magical law. Magical law is such beliefs that if you get a legal document with your names in all caps, that it’s not to you. Or that, if you don’t use a zip code, you aren’t under the laws of the United States.
In the end, you borrowed money, you owe it, and the lender is willing to take a reasonable payment. You’re not going to get out of it because the lender forgot say some sort of magical “Mother, may I?”
The law above says different to me. IMO (IANAL) the court would say you have to accept the valid legal currency that was tendered.
That’s not to say the debt would be made void by you refusing payment (as you never paid the debt), but I could imagine it might void any interest payments you charge after point I attempted to pay the debt.