What Happens When We Stop Paying Debts?

At some point, we could be struggling with debt. Many people are dreaming about a situation where they don’t need to pay bills anymore. Unfortunately, some people do a bad shortcut by stopping paying at all, which is a bad thing to do. When people are already frustrated with debts, they may refuse to read bills in their mail. When their financial situation is at the darkest, some people may refuse to go near their mailbox. They don’t want to get more depressed and eventually, collection notices and other threatening letters will start to arrive from creditors and debt collection agencies.

So, what will happen if we stop paying off our debts? Unfortunately, all the bad things that we dislike will only increase. Phone calls will get worse when stop making any payment. These phone calls can be so distressing that we will stop answering. We may let all calls to get directed to the voice mail and it will be full in no time. These could happen when multiple creditors call us every 30 minutes until our voice mail box is filled up. These people could start to get sneaky with their phone calls. It is not too uncommon for them to pretend to be one of our friends. Debt collectors could also start calling us in our office and this won’t be a good situation.

There will also be more letters, they could become more insistent and frequent, as well as more threatening. If we stop paying debts, we will get threatening letter at least once a week from each of the creditor. If we continue to ignore letters and phone calls for months, creditors could start to take legal actions against us. The next thing we know, we will get a court summon brought by the sheriff himself. This is the time when we feel so stupid in ignoring those letters and phone calls. We could eventually wake up one morning and when we go to the ATM machine, our bank account is already garnished. There’s no money left, not even one cent.

Unfortunately, we no longer have a place to put our money and any money we put into the account will be garnished to repay the creditor. We won’t be able to use our debit card and we can’t write checks for various purposes. Worse, the money that we keep for business purposes in the savings accounts can be garnished as well, especially if we don’t have separate accounts for personal and business uses. Unfortunately, there’s no way we can move the money before the garnishment occur. We will have no notice and no warning. When we find out, our savings account has been sucked completely dry.

In short, it is a bad idea to just stop paying our debts. Ignoring calls and phones will make our situation to get worse. The best thing we can do is to maintain contact with the creditor and try to negotiate. We should explain our situation and find ways to reduce interest rates, ask for reduced interest rate or even as for the cancellation of late fees.