Please tell me about Tennessee Foreclosure Law?
My son got a judgement for a little over $7,000 yesterday against this
man in Tennessee, but the person he is hidding his assets. He has no
bank account, and has no vehicle, and the land and house he is living in
is owned by his father who has been dead for 6 years.
The police also confiscated about $4,000 from him, claiming it was drug
money, although it was really $4,000 of the money he had stolen from my
son. I am wondering, is there any way to force the land he is on into
probate or something so it may end up going into this creep's name and
it can then be attached, and is there any way my son can make a claim on
the $4,000 the police took?
I don't want to overlook the obvious. I assume you have exhausted the
possibilities of attaching wages and attaching receivables and all of
the other conventional methods. I assume also that you have a
Tennessee judgment. If it is an out-of-state judgment, you will need
to convert it into a Tennessee judgment before attaching anything.
You can use Tennessee's debtor's exam procedure to question the debtor
under oath about wages, income sources, nature and location of assets.
You can sell the debt to a collection agency that specializes in this
sort of thing. You can let the judgment lay dormant for a bit less
than the number of years that the law permits, hoping the debtor will
forget about it and get a good job or buy a boat or something, then
get the judgment renewed and attach something.
Finally, I arrive at your question. If you get the Tennessee judgment
and file a lien on the property that's in the father's name (I don't
know how to do that, but a Tennessee lawyer will know), then one of
two things might happen. If the debtor wants to sell the land or
borrow against it, it will be necessary to get the lien cleared from
the title because the buyer or lender won't proceed otherwise. Or you
can foreclose on your lien, if there is no superior lien or if you
keep up the payments on the superior mortgage note. If you foreclose,
the debtor has no standing to defend, because he's not the owner.
You'll win by default. If he wants to defend, he will have to take
the property through probate. Only the executor can defend your
foreclosure.