I have provided the information below to help people dealing with wage and bank garnishments. Bankruptcy will stop both wage and bank garnishments. The automatic stay in Bankruptcy law stops the garnishment cold. The creditor is forced to immediately dismiss the garnishment lawsuit when a bankruptcy petition is filed. The bank or employer must return the garnished funds to the person filing bankruptcy.
In the State of Georgia, the following takes place in a wage or bank garnishment action. In order to file a wage or bank garnishment, the creditor must have obtained a judgment against you in a Court prior to the garnishment action.

The creditor filing the garnishment must serve you by certified mail with a copy of the garnishment action within three days of having served your bank or employer with the garnishment unless their judgment is less than 60 days old. Keep the envelope the garnishment was sent to you in with the postmark to determine if the creditor complied or not. If you didn’t receive notice then you have a good defense. Typically, people don’t know what is going on until they are notified by their bank or employer that they are being garnished.

It is important to understand that by the time a garnishment action has been served upon you there is very little you can do to stop it short of bankruptcy. If you are going to contest the garnishment, you must file an answer (or traverse) with the State Court Clerk where the garnishment has been filed within 15 days of the bank or employer furnishing their answer to the Court. The statute does not specify a specific number of days to file a traverse, but if you have not filed one within 45 days of the bank or employer being served you are probably out of luck. You can figure that the bank or employer was probably served within 3 days of the garnishment action being filed. In Georgia the only defenses to the garnishment are the existence of a judgment, the amount of the judgment is valid, and whether the creditor filed and served the garnishment according to the Georgia Statutes. Even if you file a traverse, the bank or employer is forced to comply with remitting your property or wages until such time as the Court orders otherwise. If the creditor produces a Judgment that was incorrectly obtained, you have to file a separate action in the state court where the Judgment was obtained. You should retain legal counsel if you are trying to do this. It is not easy for a non-lawyer to set aside a judgment. The Court handling the garnishment can then decide whether to stop the garnishment until the other Court who issued the judgment can determine if the judgment is valid.

Creditors have routinely been filing bank garnishments against joint bank accounts. They hope that the joint owner will just let it go without a fight since it is usually a husband and wife checking account. Keep in mind when a bank receives an Order to garnish, they will seize any account that has your name and social security number on it. They sometimes will even seize more monies than the judgment is for creating all kinds of problems. They can also seize a safety deposit box if it has your name on it. IF YOU ARE HAVING FINANCIAL PROBLEMS NEVER PUT YOUR NAME ON A CHECKING ACCOUNT OR SAFETY DEPOSIT BOX WITH AN ELDERLY PARENT OR A SPOUSE. Also keep in mind the bank may seize the funds at first, but the creditor cannot garnish monies from social security benefits in a bank account. Again if this happens you must file a traverse to stop this. If you are a joint holder of a bank account and the judgment is not against you, then you need to file a verified claim not a traverse in the bank garnishment action to fight this. If a creditor files against a joint account, they are only entitled to the portion of money in the account that each party has contributed to the amount taken by the garnishment.

If you default on your Federally Insured student loans under Federal statutes entities such as SallieMae or the Dept. of Education can garnish your wages without even obtaining a court order. There is very little recourse to stop this besides filing bankruptcy. Also, keep in mind the Internal Revenue Service can garnish wages or bank accounts without a court order. Bankruptcy may only temporarily stop the garnishments until the bankruptcy case is over, because most taxes and student loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy.