Getting a new car, even if it is only new for you personally, is always an exciting experience. Taking it out for a test drive and feeling how it responds to you, that’s always a blast. Signing all the paperwork for the car loan is much less fun. Many of us find it rather intimidating. Promising to make payments on a schedule that lasts years comes with some risks.
What happens if you lose your job or suffer some kind of financial emergency? Will you still be able to make the payments? If not, then what will happen to the car? Having your car repossessed can come with a slew of negative consequences. Hiring a Loveland repossession attorney could help you to avoid the worst of these.
To learn more, we’re going to first look at how a repossession can negatively affect your life. Following that, we’ll see how an attorney can help you to prevent repossession. But not every repossession is worth hiring an attorney over, so we’ll briefly discuss when one may not be appropriate. By the end of this, you should know whether or not you could use the services of a Loveland repossession attorney yourself.
How Can a Repossession Affect My Life?
The most obvious answer to this question is that a repossession often leaves the individual without a car. Some families may face repossession on one vehicle while maintaining payments on or owning another one. But for many of us, we only have one vehicle.
This can impact many different aspects of your life. If you need your vehicle for work, or even just to get to work, then having it get repossessed may mean you lose your job. It can also impact other areas of your life, such as picking the kids up from school or even making it difficult to get groceries.
But that’s just the most obvious negative impact. Having your car get repossessed typically means that your credit score has already been impacted due to late or missed payments. But once a repossession happens, your credit score could plummet even faster.
A poor credit score can mean you don’t have the credit necessary to apply for a credit card you need, purchase another car, or even rent a home for you and your family. When it comes to your credit score, it’s best to be proactive and take steps to protect it rather than letting it plummet and cause you a whole slew of anxieties.
How Can an Attorney Help Me Prevent Repossession?
One of the best ways that an attorney can help you to stop your vehicle from being repossessed is through bankruptcy. By assisting you to file for bankruptcy, an attorney can help you to have more control over what is and what isn’t taken.
The primary way that filing for bankruptcy can help to prevent repossession is not actually through the bankruptcy process itself. The process is important for getting a gasp on your finances once they have spiraled out of control and this can in turn help you with car payments by reducing the amount owed or by reorganizing your debts into a single manageable payment rather than many smaller ones.
But the reason that bankruptcy is useful to prevent a repossession is due to the fact that it places an automatic stay that prevents creditors from collecting payments from you or from repossessing your property. This stay can prevent the car from being repossessed while the bankruptcy process can give you a better shot at keeping your head above financial waters.
Is Repossession Always Worth Hiring an Attorney Over?
The question of hiring an attorney is always a tricky one. In many situations, the cost of hiring an attorney is worth the peace of mind that one would bring. By being able to offer you a legal solution to your issues, you may be able to sleep easier at night knowing that you’ve taken steps to protect yourself from repossession.
But there are also situations where it may be inappropriate to hire an attorney. One such reason is that you don’t want the car back. If you know for a fact that you won’t be able to keep up with payments, and losing the car isn’t going to have too negative of an impact on your life, then you probably wouldn’t need the services of an attorney.
Likewise, if you want the car back and you have the money available to pay off your debt then you don’t need an attorney. At this point, you would be better off paying for the vehicle itself. Hiring an attorney would only add an additional cost to the situation that isn’t really warranted.
However, keep in mind that these approaches don’t take into account negative impacts to your credit score. A repossession of a car you don’t want might not seem like such a big thing but the impact it can have on your credit score may say otherwise.
Can a Repossession Attorney Help Me?
A repossession attorney could help in a number of ways. The primary, as mentioned above, is through bankruptcy filings. But there are also situations where lenders have wrongfully repossessed a car and this could be another situation where a repossession attorney could offer assistance.
When reaching out to a repossession attorney, don’t be afraid to ask about fees. As the customer in the transaction, it is up to you to decide if representation is worth the cost. In many cases, the cost of letting a car get repossessed is far greater than the cost of hiring an attorney. The price you’re looking at will depend on the car, the loan, and the details of the situation.
A repossession attorney can help you prevent your vehicle from being repossessed, as well as offer services and advice on how to start on a full financial recovery so you don’t end up in the same situation again a few months or years down the road.