Don’t Let Your Indebtedness Take Away Your Passport

Unpaid debt burdens you in many ways. It eats up most, if not all, of your paycheck. It makes it more expensive to borrow money, and sometimes it causes lenders to reject your loan applications outright. Employers and landlords can turn you away because of your troubled repayment history, and let’s not even get started on how hard it is to find love, because you spend all your time on work and all your money on debt repayment. In fact, your debt and the tough economic circumstances that caused it are major reasons why you are divorced. At least this summer you get to take your children to visit your extended family in your country of origin, or at least, that was the plan. The new consumer-unfriendly enforcement of a decidedly consumer-unfriendly law could put a dent in your plans. For help addressing your debts before your unpaid child support gets so far out of control that the State Department takes away your passport, contact a Boca Raton debt lawyer.

Child Support Is the Most Stubborn Kind of Debt

You are not the only person who feels that child support is the most painful of your debts. You can’t discharge it in bankruptcy court, and you still have to pay it to your ex even if your youngest child reached adulthood years ago. The only way to make child support debt go away is to pay it, or else to petition the court to modify your child support order retroactively; even then, it is the judge’s decision to decide how much to reduce your child support obligations.

The punishments you can get for not paying child support are worse than the ones for non-fulfillment of other financial obligations. The Founding Fathers were determined not to have debtors’ prisons in the United States, and yet the family court can hold you in criminal contempt if you fall too far behind on your child support payments, and it can even send you to jail. There are fewer steps before the court starts garnishing your paychecks when you owe child support than there are for other debts. To add insult to injury, there are plenty of other broke parents out there who get to spend time with their children as they choose, without the court’s interference; this only happened to you because your ex insisted on getting a divorce.

State Department Takes Away Passports of Parents With Unpaid Child Support

The federal law that allows the State Department to rescind your passport or refuse to issue you one if you owe overdue child support has been on the books since 1996. It is only in the past few months that the government has relied on it to take people’s passports away, though. Thousands of people have had to put their travel plans on hold because of this rule, mostly those who owe more than $100,000 in unpaid child support.

Work With a Debt Lawyer About Child Support Debt

A South Florida debt lawyer can help you free up funds to pay your overdue child support.  Contact Nowack & Olson, PLLC in Boca Raton, Florida to discuss your case.

Source:

msn.com/en-us/travel/news/thousands-of-americans-to-be-stripped-of-us-passports-from-may-8-under-newly-enforced-debt-rule/ar-AA22ImLm?ocid=msedgntp&pc=ACTS&cvid=69fe753fc94340e2ad964a08d84a1dcb&ei=31