Turning a Richmond Hill Judgment Into Actual Money

The situation

Jae-won, an elementary school teacher, and Ari, an insurance adjuster, had spent years building modest savings the ordinary way — two salaries, a paid-down mortgage, a line of credit they never touched. In 2022 they used a chunk of it to help a family friend, Dov, buy into a franchise location of a national quick-service restaurant chain. The arrangement was a private loan of $150,000, documented in a signed promissory note with a repayment schedule and interest.

For the first year, payments came in roughly on time. Then they slowed, then stopped. Dov's franchise was struggling with rising food costs and thin margins, and he told Jae-won and Ari he simply could not keep paying while also servicing the loan he had taken from his supplier to open the location. After months of missed payments and unreturned calls, they came to Treadstone Law not for advice on whether to sue — they already knew they would have to — but on what came after.

Winning the case was only half the problem

The lawsuit itself was straightforward. A signed promissory note with a clear repayment schedule and a documented default is one of the more provable claims a civil court sees. Because the amount owed was well above the Small Claims Court limit, the claim was filed in the Superior Court of Justice, and Dov did not seriously dispute the debt — he could not point to any defence beyond his own cash flow. Judgment was obtained for the outstanding principal of $150,000 plus pre-judgment interest, bringing the total to just over $178,000.

That is where many people assume the story ends. It does not. A judgment is a piece of paper that says the court agrees you are owed money — it is not a mechanism that moves money out of the debtor's account and into yours. Nothing about winning a lawsuit forces a debtor to pay voluntarily, and Dov did not. He kept operating the franchise, kept a bank account, kept drawing an income from the business, and kept ignoring the judgment.

This is the part of a debt case that surprises most clients: enforcement is a separate, active process, with its own tools, its own paperwork, and its own timeline. A judgment does not expire quickly, but it also does not collect itself. Someone has to identify what the debtor owns or earns, and then use the right legal instrument against the right target, in the right order, to actually extract payment.

What we did

1. Filed the writ of seizure and sale first, because it is cheap insurance. A writ of seizure and sale is a document filed with the sheriff's enforcement office in the county where the debtor owns property. Once filed, it attaches to any real estate the debtor owns in that county — meaning Dov could not sell or refinance his home without the judgment being paid out of the proceeds first. Filing it costs little and does not require locating a single dollar of the debtor's money; it simply sits on title as a standing claim. We filed it within weeks of judgment, well before Dov had any reason to think about moving or refinancing.
2. Conducted an examination in aid of execution. Before garnishing anything, we needed to know where Dov's money actually was — which bank held his accounts, whether the franchise business had its own account separate from his personal one, and what his income actually looked like after expenses. Ontario's rules allow a judgment creditor to summon the debtor to a formal examination, under oath, to answer exactly these questions. Dov's answers, combined with a review of the corporate registration for his franchise operation, gave us the two targets that mattered: the operating bank account the franchise used for daily deposits, and Dov's personal wages, which he paid himself as a modest salary from the business on top of profit draws.
3. Garnished the business bank account. A garnishment order served on a bank requires it to freeze and redirect funds in the named account, up to the amount owed, instead of releasing them to the account holder. Business accounts are attractive enforcement targets precisely because deposits flow in regularly — every time a customer paid by debit or the point-of-sale system settled a batch, the bank was legally required to intercept a portion of it under the order rather than letting Dov draw it down. This produced the first real payments in the file, in irregular but recurring amounts as the account balance fluctuated.
4. Garnished his wages at the same time. Running two garnishments in parallel — the business account and Dov's personal salary — meant collection did not depend on a single source. Ontario law caps how much of a debtor's wages can be garnished at once, which keeps the debtor able to meet basic living costs but also keeps this stream slower and steadier than the account garnishment. We treated it as the reliable baseline while the bank account garnishment did the heavier lifting.
5. Kept the pressure structural, not personal. We did not call Dov directly or negotiate a side deal outside the court process. Every dollar collected flowed through the enforcement mechanisms already in place, tracked against the outstanding judgment balance including the post-judgment interest that continued to accrue under the Courts of Justice Act. This mattered because it meant Jae-won and Ari never had to trust Dov's word about a payment plan — the legal tools did the collecting whether or not he cooperated.

The outcome

Over the following fourteen months, the combination of the two garnishments recovered the full judgment. The business account garnishment did most of the work — busy weeks at the franchise location produced larger intercepted amounts, and slower weeks produced less, but the payments never stopped arriving because the order stayed in place the entire time. The wage garnishment added a smaller, steady amount on top. Dov never made a single voluntary payment after judgment; every dollar came through the enforcement process itself.

The writ of seizure and sale was never actually used to force a sale of Dov's home — it did not need to be. Its presence on title was enough to guarantee that if he had ever tried to sell or refinance before the debt was paid, the judgment would have come out of the proceeds automatically. That is often how a writ works in practice: as leverage sitting quietly in the background rather than a sale that actually happens.

By the time the last garnished payment cleared, Jae-won and Ari had recovered the full $178,000, plus the additional interest that had accrued during the enforcement period itself. It took longer than either of them expected when they first won the lawsuit — they had assumed, reasonably, that a judgment meant the matter was over. What actually closed the file was the enforcement work that came after.

What you can learn from this