If you share a bank account with someone who has a judgment against them, your account can be frozen in full — even if the debt isn’t yours and most of the money is.
This surprises a lot of people, including spouses who’ve never been sued and have no idea a garnishment is coming. Here’s how Virginia law actually treats joint accounts when a garnishment order lands on the bank.
How ownership of a joint account works under Virginia law
Va. Code § 6.2-606 sets the default rule: a joint account belongs to each party “in proportion to the net contributions by each,” except that a joint account between spouses is presumed to belong to them equally — unless there’s clear and convincing evidence the parties intended something different. In practice, that means if you’re married to the debtor and share an account, the bank’s starting assumption is that half the money is legally yours and half is theirs, regardless of whose paycheck actually funded it.
What happens when the garnishment order arrives
The bank doesn’t get to sort out ownership on its own. When a garnishment order is served on a bank holding a joint account, the bank generally freezes the funds in the account and answers the garnishment summons. If the judgment creditor wants to actually collect against a joint account, the clerk can issue a notice to the co-depositors — and it then becomes the non-debtor co-owner’s responsibility to take action to protect their share of the funds, rather than the bank sorting it out automatically. If nothing is done, the frozen funds can end up applied to the debtor’s judgment even though part of that money was never the debtor’s to begin with.
What a non-debtor co-owner should do
- Act quickly. The statute puts the burden of asserting your ownership interest on you, not the bank or the court.
- Gather proof of your contributions — pay stubs, deposit records, anything showing which funds in the account are traceable to you rather than the debtor.
- Talk to an attorney about intervening in the garnishment proceeding to claim your share before the funds are disbursed to the creditor.
How this interacts with a homestead deed
A homestead deed protects the debtor’s own exempt share of property, including money genuinely belonging to them in a bank account, from being taken by a judgment creditor — see Wage Garnishment Exemptions in Virginia for the dollar amounts. But it doesn’t automatically solve the joint-account problem for a non-debtor co-owner, because the homestead exemption is a debtor’s tool, not a mechanism for a third party to reclaim funds. If you’re the co-owner and you’re not the one being sued, your path is intervening directly to prove your ownership share — not filing a homestead deed yourself.
If you are the debtor on a joint account that’s just been frozen, the homestead deed can still protect your own exempt share of the funds if you file it correctly and on time. See When to File Your Virginia Homestead Deed for the filing deadline, since bank-account garnishments and wage garnishments follow different timing rules.
If you’ve discovered a joint account was frozen and you’re not sure whether the money is protected, call us at 757-837-2230 — this is exactly the kind of situation worth a quick call before assuming either “it’s fine” or “it’s all lost.”