Creditors and lawsuits/garnishments

[HLS]

How far past due do you have to be before creditor tries to sue you? Reason why I ask is there is a delay in me filing for bankruptcy apparently I’ve been working so much overtime my payments will be too high so my attorney wants Me to cancel overtime and stop working overtime for a month or 2 or so they can re-calculate my annual income

[justbroke]

Blindfolded, you could throw a dart at a 4-year calendar and probably hit a random correct date than any person can predict.

HLS, there is no way anyone can tell you the length of time. Most creditors will sell to a junk debt buyer (JDB). Few creditors will do in-house collections and lawsuits. The only two that I know that do their own suits are Best Buy and American Express. (Discover may also be suit happy.)

Most creditors look at many factors before wasting time on a lawsuit.

Having wrote that, it is generally 90 days past due before the debt is written off and the creditor takes the most aggressive collection tactics up to and including a lawsuit. There is no way to tell if or when a creditor will resort to a lawsuit. My guess, because there's no way to tell, is that AMEX and Best Buy will have a suit after 180 days.

[HLS]

I do have accounts with American Express and Best Buy but I Will probably file within the next four months so I will probably be OK. My lawyer only uses three months worth of income to calculate my annual so hopefully I’ll be filing by Christmas.

[Carmella]

It took months if not a year or longer in my experience and even after that I was able to delay it by waiting out the 30 days to respond and we even went to court on a few pretrials and they set a new pretrial. A lawyer from the creditor comes and is super nice/understanding wanting to work out a deal for payment and we had the pretrial extended to another date.

This is just my experience I can't say what would happen in your case or if things are different in different states.