Three branches · one question first
They are suing over a card you stopped paying years ago.
Before anything else, you need to know which of three situations you are actually in.
- A
The clock has run out
Every state sets a deadline for suing on a debt. Once it has passed, that becomes a defense you have to raise. No court raises it for you.
- B
A payment restarted it
Even a small one. Even long after the account went quiet. In many states a payment restarts the lawsuit clock, which is why the phone call matters more than it looks.
- C
It was never yours
Wrong person, wrong account, or a balance nobody can trace back to a contract with your name on it.
Read all three. Which one is yours changes what you do next.
Two clocks, and people mix them up constantly.
How long a debt stays on your credit report and how long a collector can sue you are different numbers, set by different rules. One of them running out does not mean the other has.
The credit report clock is federal. The lawsuit clock is state law, and which state’s law applies can itself be argued, because card agreements often point somewhere else.
“Paying an old debt can restart the clock on getting sued, but it never restarts the clock on credit reporting.”
This page describes how the rules generally work. States differ, your own dates and your own state govern, and KillDebt is not a law firm.
On video
Brian builds the timer on camera.
Brian, on the clock
Killing the Time Barred Debt Collection Lawsuit
How the defense actually works.
Counting the clock
The count starts in the account’s own history, and the collector’s paperwork is where those dates live. Their complaint and their exhibits name a last payment, a charge-off, and the day they filed.
“the clock usually runs from the date of last payment or last activity, depending on your state”
A charge-off is an accounting move on the creditor’s books. It does not start the count again.
Those dates come from whoever is suing you. Most of these cases are filed by a debt buyer that bought the account, and we have a page on seven of the debt buyers.
The trap
A collector who wants the clock restarted asks for a small payment and calls it good faith. That is the call to be careful on.
“In many states the clock does not restart without a voluntary payment by the debtor or a signed written acknowledgment of the debt.”
Which states, and what counts as a payment, differ. Some block revival outright. We publish no list of them, because a list that is wrong for your state costs you the defense.
Raising it
The deadline is an affirmative defense. That is the vocabulary your court uses, and it means you state it yourself, in your answer.
“in most jurisdictions, affirmative defenses you don’t raise are waived. You lose the right to use them later.”
What it looks like on paper depends on your court’s rules, and your court publishes those rules.
When they sued anyway
Federal law bars a debt collector from suing on a debt that is already time barred. Regulation F says it in one line.
“must not bring or threaten to bring a legal action against a consumer to collect a time-barred debt”
The rule does not ask what the collector knew. The CFPB dropped that standard before the rule was final. So the same fact that answers the lawsuit can also be raised against the collector in the same case.
“plead the statute of limitations as an affirmative defense, and evaluate an FDCPA counterclaim in the same action”
Whether any of that fits your case is for your court, your dates and your state. We are describing a mechanism, and we are not telling you what to do with it.
On video
He works one real case all the way through.
Brian, from the beginning
The Statute of Limitations: Your Most Powerful Defense Against a Collection Lawsuit - Full Version
If the clock really has run, this may be one letter.
Some people reading this have no lawsuit. They have a letter, or a run of calls, about an account they had stopped thinking about. For them the whole job can be one written response: ask the collector to validate the debt, and tell them to stop collecting until they do.
Nobody needs a subscription to put that in the mail. If one letter is all your situation calls for, send one letter.
One tradeoff to know first. A cease and desist stops the contact, and it also ends any conversation about settling. Brian makes the matching point in the library: an old account that may already be past the deadline is not one to pay off.
If this is not quite your situation
You can start on it tonight.
The dates in their own paperwork decide this defense. ParkerGPT works from those.
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