When your budget, finances, or your home is facing problems, the first thing you should do is find a good HOA management company. Most companies or professionals in this field have a list of local contacts that they use to help get your payments handled. Hiring such a service could save you from living through another financial crisis. Hiring a company would also let you get back on track with your payments and avoid future problems with the HOA.

If your HOA management company cannot handle paying your bills on time, hiring an HOA collection agent is one way to help ease the tension between the homeowners and their HOA. HOA collections agents are experts at finding the right collection agency that can get your delinquent payments instigated. They are also experienced in dealing with the HOA management company and communicating effectively with them to reach the right resolution.

What exactly does an HOA collection agency do? They collect late dues from the homeowners and the association. The fee they charge is 10 percent of the outstanding amount owed. It pays to find a professional in this line of work. It would be a waste of money for you to try to handle collecting overdue payments on your own.

Some of the things they do include: Making phone calls, sending certified demand notice letters, and making follow-up calls to the delinquent homeowner to follow up on payments. In some cases, the HOA collection agency may propose a payment plan. They would give the homeowner options like lowering the interest rate, extending the time period, reducing the monthly payment, etc. Once these options are agreed upon, the collection agency would make contact with the homeowner and make arrangements to collect the late payment. If all of these options are exhausted, the next step would be court action.

There is a possibility that the HOA management company will file a lawsuit against the delinquent homeowner before sending the balance over to an HOA collection agency to handle the rest of the finances. This is the second step. If the lawsuit is initiated by the association, all members are personally liable. They may be held personally liable for the association,s expenses and the costs of the litigation, even if the association has filed the lawsuit in a circuit court. An attorney who is well versed in HOAs and other civil law could be an asset to your defense.

For homeowners who cannot afford to hire an attorney, there is a better way to proceed. You can engage the services of an HOA automatic collection agency to take care of your delinquent payments. These companies have been set up to prevent problems like the one that the association is facing. The automatic collection process is simple to use; you simply set up an account with the collection service and authorize the company to debit the account on a monthly basis for your delinquent payments.