If you have impaired credit and bought a car from one of the Andy Mohr Indianapolis-area dealerships, there is a good chance that your loan was placed with BAAM Financial Inc. BAAM Financial files a lot of lawsuits in Marion county. In representing a current client, I noticed that BAAM sues for unusually high deficiencies in what would be expected to be suits involving relatively low-priced vehicles. Let me explain.
My client purchased a 2005 Nissan Altima from Andy Mohr Nissan, Inc. in May 2013. She financed $10,398.65 on this car which had over 133,000 miles on it when she purchased it. That’s not a good deal, in my opinion, but it’s not illegal. The car was financed with BAAM Financial at 21% interest. Again, not a good deal in my opinion, but if you have credit issues you don’t always have a choice. She made payments on it (not always on-time) until September 2016, when it was repossessed by BAAM. At the time it was repossessed, there was a listed balance on the loan of $8,100.54. It is this amount that BAAM sued her for plus costs, interest and attorney fees.
Note that the record this stage doesn’t reflect that BAAM recovered any proceeds from the sale after repossession of the vehicle, or that BAAM applied proceeds to the loan balance sued upon. The law is clear that after repossessing a vehicle, the lender is supposed to dispose of the vehicle in a commercially reasonable way. It is possible that an old vehicle with mechanical problems doesn’t have any commercial value. If that is the case, we are going to argue in this case that it is commercially unreasonable to repossess it in the first place, and if the lender repossesses the vehicle then finds out that it has no value, we are going to argue that commercial reasonableness requires that the lender needs to give the owner a chance to reclaim the vehicle.
I did a quick survey of what happened in five other BAAM Financial cases in Marion County Indiana. All of these cases went to default judgment, so the attorney fees are not likely too high. Each one of these cases reflect what are (in my opinion) high deficiency balances for subprime credit vehicles. I don’t have records to tell me what caused the high deficiencies in these cases, but based on my experience with other cases, I would guess a mixture of high initial prices plus low prices obtained on disposition. Sometimes low prices at disposition are caused by commercially unreasonable sales, and sometimes not.
Case Number Judgment Amount
49D10-1604-CC-012616 $12,314,81
49D14-1601-CC-00113 $ 8,402.18 (“and forfeiture of 2004 F150”)
49D04-1601-CC-000104 $13,266.49
49D01-1001-CC-00118 $13,370.49
49D01-1601-CC-00110 $ 8406.63
In summary, the amounts they are claiming after all credits were applied including after the sale of the car, looks a lot like what the car sold for originally, This isn’t right, and judgments like these can be the financial deathblow to a struggling individual or family.
If you are currently being sued by Baam Financial, please talk to a lawyer. You need to make sure your rights are protected. You need to make sure that the vehicle was sold in a commerically reasonable way and that the proceeds of the sale were applied to your balance. If the finance company did not sell your vehicle in a commercially reasonable way (and getting an unusually low price at resale is often a result), you may be able to defend completely or partially against a lawsuit claiming a deficiency. In certain cases, you may be able to raise a claim for damages and attorney fees to be paid by the other side.
IF YOU HAVE BEEN SUED BY BAAM FINANCIAL, INC., EVEN IF YOUR CASE WENT TO JUDGMENT, I WILL REVIEW YOUR PAPERWORK AT NO CHARGE TO YOU. PLEASE CALL ME AT 317-662-4529 OR EMAIL ME AT HOFERLAWINDY@GMAIL.COM.