Repossessions in the News

A couple of interesting repossession stories came out of Ohio recently.  The first one was about a glitch in the creditor’s system that resulted in automatic payments failing to be made:

On Thanksgiving Day, people showed up to repossess my car! They said I hadn’t made payments since August. I had guests over for Thanksgiving and my car was towed right there!

After I checked, I realized that, indeed, my lease payments hadn’t been deducted since August. GM Financial says that, in order for me to get my car back, I have to pay a penalty of several hundred dollars. This is outrageous.

The author gave good advice on keeping up with payments:

While this absolutely was GM Financial’s fault, the situation didn’t have to get this bad and it shouldn’t have come down to your car being repossessed. You should have noticed sometime in September or October or November that your car payments were not being deducted. If you had noticed this, you could have contacted GM Financial sometime in the last three months to get this issue addressed before it got to the point of repossession and your credit rating being trashed.

I know you said these payments weren’t coming from your primary checking account, and that you don’t check in on the account often. I recommend that people check on their financial accounts — bank accounts, credit cards and perhaps investment accounts — at least once a week. If once a week seems to be too often for you, I don’t understand how you can’t check on your accounts at least once a month.

The second story was about a repo agent hanging on to the side of car:

[The repo agent] told police he went to pick up the already running Equinox at 1619 Ferndale Ave. SW when the owner appeared on the passenger side, jumped over the center console into the driver’s seat and began driving away. Allen said he was dragged for a few feet before letting go of the side of the SUV, according to the report.

Allen jumped into his Chevrolet pickup and followed the vehicle. As he drove, Allen called police, informing them what was happening and where the two vehicles were located.

Obviously, this turned into a dangerous situation which is why the law requires repo agents to only repo cars if it can be done without a breach of the peace.