Legal Question in Credit and Debt Law in Georgia
A judgement for $11596 was entered against me in 6/2012. I agreed to pay $300/month on the 5th of each month until satisfied. After 6 months or so I was unable to pay by the 5th and began paying later in the month. I asked to have due date changed and was told no because it was a court order. I was never 30 days late. After paying later in the month for nearly 18 months, the attorney filed and was granted a writ of fieri facias which allowed them to add interest to the debt. 4 months later they attempted to garnish my wages but I filed a Traverse of Defendant and won because I was never 30 days late. Can I have the writ of fieri facias overturned? It has added over 3k in interest to the debt. Otherwise I have satisfied the original judgement
1 Answer from Attorneys
No. Judgments earn interest at the post-judgment rate. That has nothing to do with issuance of the FiFa (fieri facias - or writ of execution).
If you wanted to stop interest this had to be part of the agreement. The problem here is you missed a payment and/or paid late. It does not matter by how much. You cannot just unilaterally modify an arrangeemnt by paying whenever you feel like it. The agreement is the agreement. The creditor is not required to guess when the next payment is coming or wait for days or weeks. Court orders can only be modified by going back to court but nothing ever prohibits parties from making a new arrangement.
You did not really handle this well from the get go. You should have hired a lawyer to help you negotiate this payment arrangement. Or you could have gotten a lawyer involved in the modification of your payment date or at the wage garnishment stage. But I don't know what you did or did not do as I have not seen the papers.
Judgments can still be resolved in most cases (absent wage garnishment - debts are hard to resolve once garnishment starts). Do you have funds for a reasonable settlement of the debt? Depending on who the creditor is, most settlements fall between 50% - 80% of the current judgment balance. Unless your agreement said otherwise, interest was probably already a part of each payment you sent in - it would be applied to interest and then principal . So what you thought was going to principal was in fact going to interest and principal and the balance was going down like you thought.
Really, you need to do what you should have done and let a lawyer review this, see what the current balance is and see if this can be resolved lump sum if you have the funds.