I’m sure everyone has seen movies or TV shows where someone spends a boatload of money (on credit), can’t pay up and then we have the scene of burly guys carrying the TV, sofa, potted plants and bathroom mirror out into a truck.
Does this actually occur in our modern age? I guess I could believe it back a couple decades ago if you bought all of your stuff from a store account (say, a Sears charge) but I doubt Capital One or Chase knows what I bought at Best Buy, much less Walmart. Would the court seize your property if a creditor successfully sued you?
I’m speaking of having your house/apartment cleaned out by repo men here, not having your car repossessed which can obviously happen. And, thankfully, this is not a “Need Answer Fast” type of question.
Each state has a number of judgment exemptions when it comes to collecting on judgments. These range from fairly generous all the way up to total homestead exemptions.
If something like this did happen (think O.J. Simpson), it is usually a sheriff’s or police department doing the siezing, not a bunch of goons.
With a credit card, the line of credit is unsecured, so all the card company can do is sue you. If they win the suit, they file further actions to seize certain assets (with exceptions per state law as racer72 notes.)
That’s different than a secured loan, such as for a car or boat (or house) for which the lender can simply steal back the collateral. (With a house it’s a bit more involved.)
My impression of the classic movie furniture-repo scene is that some yutz went and got himself a bunch of stuff at one of those “rent-to-own” furniture/appliance places, then stopped paying the bill.
The situation in the UK is a bit different. If you are taken to court about a debt and a judgement is issued against you, baliffs can be employed to seize goods to satisfy the debt. There are some controls over what they can take (although fewer controls for certain types of debt, like tax-related), and they aren’t allowed to force entry to your home. However they are allowed to take advantage of open windows or doors to get in in the first place.
The debtor can arrange there and then to pay off some of the debt and thus delay the seizing, effectively they rent use of their own stuff for a short time. Obvously these would all be last resort measures.
So - the idea of a house being cleaned out is fairly unlikely even here, but it theoretically does happen. To lose furniture and items essential to domestic life, you’d have to have a heft debt to government-type agencies, which had been deemed enforceable by a court and had proceedings issued to do so. Again, it’s not really the classic ‘stop paying, get the stuff taken back’ repo situation.
[totally uninformative anecdote that I love to share]
My family name isn’t wholly uncommon around my home town. And there was another person who lived in a nearby suburb who had the same first and last name as my father (and me, since I’m a Jr.). The other person had, shall we say, a cavalier attitude toward fulfilling his financial obligations.
Occasionally, when this deadbeat would run up some bills he wasn’t paying, my dad would get phone calls from creditors who’d simply matched his first and last name with the deadbeat’s. He was usually quite calm in telling them they had the wrong guy, but sometimes it really tried his patience.
One day when he was feeling especially fed up, he got one of those calls. It was Sears, and they wanted to know when they were going to get paid for the lawn tractor. My dad said to the caller, “Do you have my address there?” There was a pause while, apparently, the caller read off the address they had on record. Naturally, this was not our address. My dad replied, “Fine. I’m sick of you calling me. Come down here and get the damn thing” and hung up.
We didn’t get any more calls after that.
[/uninformative anecdote]
When I first graduated college, I started working at one of those furniture/appliance centers. It was a rather well known national chain. I started out as a goon. It was my job to call people and get them to pay, and when they didn’t, I drove my box-truck to their house and knocked on the door until I got an answer. Of course, I was always polite and came back later if they could not be bothered to answer the door and hand me some money or merchandise. I seemed to do well at this, and was promoted to manage a few guys. It honestly is a full-time repo business, with some shallow sales tactics on top. After a while, I was basically a full-time sales guy, and there were people who I sold stuff to that I knew we would be chasing later. There were also people who knew how to play the time with no payments (free-time deals) and so many days “same as cash” that they would get pretty good deals on some stuff, and that was okay.
To be honest, I have taken merchandise from trashy houses in the crack-house area of town to really nice houses on the edge of town that belong to people in a rather professional career. It’s kind of interesting. Some people buy beyond what they can afford, but others assume that they are above paying for the stuff they get.
With a credit card it would be nearly impossible to figure out what to sieze. Let’s say I have a $1,000 line of credit with Cap One. I buy ten items of various value that cost $1,000. OK I pay for 6 months then stop. Let’s say I’ve paid $500 on it and owe $500 (no interest for the sake of this example)’
Now here’s the problem WHAT have you paid for? Did you pay for one or two items in total? Did you just pay part of the bill on all 10 things you bought?
How could anyone decide what to sieze? What if I sold something I bought? If Cap One said, the $500.00 applied only in part to a DVD player but I sold it, how do you get that back?
In the old days you had a store credit and a coupon book with payments on each item. It was farily easy to figure out what you were paying for. You walked into the store each week or month and handed a coupon and the payment. It was applied to one account or partially to all of them. It was easy to figure out which items were being paid for and how those paynments were being applied
I don’t think it’s hard at all. You take whatever you can until you get to what you think you can sell for $500. Of course, the legal system doesn’t really support this model, but it’s not because the logistics are difficult.
Yeah, I suppose that was my question at the end of the OP. I know that Credit Card Company XYZ has no idea which items in my home came from where unlike the old days of store credit accounts. I didn’t know if the court or some other circumstances allowed for a “clean out” if it ever came down to it.
I recall an article on Peter Pocklington, of the “I sold Wayne Gretzky” fame. After losing his shirt in Alberta, he moved to California and went into wholesale rip-off territory. The article mentioned, for example, a custom golf-club company that he “bought”, ran into the ground and gutted, then never got around to paying the original owner.
After several of these similar episodes, he went bankrupt and claimed he had no money, and several of the creditors got together and had a sherriff and bailiff (IIRC?) go trhough the house with them about 2 years ago, seizing art objects and memorabilia that they though would satisfy the judgements to some extent. There was some legal wrangling about what was and was his art vs. his wife’s and some was “borrowed” from other corporations, and I don’t know the exact process.
Just to make things more interesting, apparently he went to jail a few weeks ago for hiding some assets from the court during his bankruptcy hearings, so I guess that art won’t matter that much…