Bankruptcy can stop a garnishment. A lot of times in Washington you will get a judgment against you and you won’t even realize it. They do not have to take you to court per se. They send you documents that start the lawsuit process and you might not recognize that you’ve just been sued.
If you don’t respond to that, they take out what’s called a default judgment against you and they start a garnishment process where they go into your employer and they show this judgment and they say, “You now have to pay us part of this person’s paycheck every week or every pay period.” And you usually don’t notice it until you get a letter from your employer saying, we are now taking this out and your paycheck is about 25 percent less than what it was supposed to be.
A bankruptcy automatically stops that garnishment from continuing to come out. And what we can do, depending on your situation, is work towards a bankruptcy, either a chapter seven or chapter thirteen, that would be filed quickly to stop it. Afterward, we would work towards fixing the problem of getting it off of your paycheck going forward, and then you wouldn’t owe that money anymore.