How much time do I have to sue my Tenant & Can I garnish wages to collect a judgment?

If you’re going to sue with regard to a written or even an oral lease agreement, you have four years from the date of what’s called your cause of action. Or, more simply, you need to file your lawsuit within four years of the Tenant’s breach of the Lease.

You have four years to bring the lawsuit, but not to win the case, not to get to final judgment, not to complete the appeal. You have four years to bring the lawsuit to court.

Naturally, we don’t recommend waiting that long for a couple of reasons. First of all, you’re going to get fuzzy with the facts. The longer you wait to sue, the likelier you (or your witnesses) will lose data or forget details.

And unless everything is absolutely documented perfectly, you’re probably going to have to use your memory for some of these facts. So, it’s best to do it within the first year.

The second issue has to do with your ability to find the Tenant. Without the Tenant’s place of employment or current address, you won’t be able to serve the lawsuit.

Generally speaking, you can find a Tenant within the first year. Most Tenants don’t leave the state. A few do. But if you have no idea where this Tenant is, you can’t sue them because you can’t find them.

The Tenants, have to be personally served with notice of your lawsuit. So, while you do have up to four years, we certainly don’t recommend that you wait that long.

The next important question deals with recovering a judgment that you’ve already won. So, you’ve gone to court, the matter has been closed out by the judge, you have a judgment, but you don’t know what to do with it. And liquidating the judgment can be complicated.

Let’s say, you’ve won a $5,000 judgment. That includes attorney’s fees, court’s costs, and it’s accruing interest. But you’ve had this judgment on the shelf for ten years. It’s still a good judgment. Unfortunately, there’s a procedure that you have to revive a judgment after ten years.

But the truth is, you can keep a judgment alive for as long as the defendant is alive. So, even a ten-year old judgment is still perfectly collectible. You have 2 years to revive a dormant judgment.

But, let’s say, there has been a couple of years since that judgment. There are a couple of steps that you want to do to begin the collection process.

One thing we were asked specifically is – “How can I garnish wages? I want to take my judgment to the employer and say, “Pay my judgment, please.” Sorry, there is no wage garnishment in Texas for a Civil Judgment. So, you are limited in your ability to collect your judgment, and you cannot garnish any wages.

What you can do is – you can potentially cease certain non-exempt real or personal property, especially if it’s not somebody’s homestead. If they own a piece of property, and it’s not where they are living, you can actually seize that property and have it auctioned in a Constable sale to cover the value of your judgment.

You can also seize assets in an account: a savings account and a checking account are potentially good access that you would have to recovering of some of your judgment funds, particularly, if you’ve gotten that information from the application process. In the application one has to pay the application fee with a check written from an account that they own.

So, these are parts of your intake when you’re getting new Tenants. You have to have a savings account, or a checking account, or both. Then you have a means to collect after a judgment. If you know that they have an account, it is possible to seize the funds in that account.

Finally, there’s personal property. So if they own a boat, or a motorcycle, or they own more than one vehicle – those assets could potentially be seized if they’re registered in a given County.

You can file your judgment through an Abstract what’s called a writ of execution. And you can use these documents against property that they own that is registered in any given Texas County.

So, there are mechanisms to collect. And, if you really get somebody’s attention, they’ll come to you and say, “Don’t take my stuff, I’ll pay the judgment, I’ve accumulated the funds. Where do I send it, so you can release the judgment against me?”

Sometimes immediately after a court case a Tenant who has run out of funds, cannot pay a judgment. Perhaps later down the line they’ll have assets.

Make sure to Request the Social Security Number, Driver’s License Number, Date of Birth, etc., in your application. And here is another good thing that I always recommend to clients.

If you file an Abstract of Judgment with identifying information, like the last four numbers of a Social Security Number and the last four numbers of Texas Driver’s License, so that somebody can be particularly identified, you may find that a few years down the line, after you’ve gotten your judgment because you’ve Abstracted, when they want to buy a house in the county where you live and where they may still live, they simply can’t do that.

The Tenants are not going to be able to jump over the hurdle of your judgment lien. A lender will be hesitant to loan money to somebody who’s got a judgment lien on them because they potentially could put their collateral at risk.

Because of that, abstracting a judgment is a good way in the future to collect on these judgments. And you may get that knock on the door from somebody who wants to buy a house, or pull out some other loan, but cannot until they clear your judgment lien.

So, collecting judgments can be complicated, but you do have recourse. And if you have questions, you need to talk to somebody with experience this in this arena.

​To book a consultation click here https://lawofficeoferniegarcia.as.me/or call us (281) 888 – 1129 to book over the phone.