Bail Bond Collateral Explained

When you take out a bail bond, you're dealing with extremely large sums of money, often amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Therefore, messing around and not taking it 100% seriously is going to be frowned upon by the people that you are dealing with. It is most likely that you will be dealing with a bail bondsman, who will be a professional person with years of experience in this area. If the case looks to be quite risky, or the bondsman doesn't trust you for one reason or another, it is likely that he or she will ask you for bail bond collateral as a way of covering some of the risk they will be taking.

Collateral is essentially any type of asset that can be sold to give the full value of the bail bond in case it needs to be paid. This will happen if the bond is forfeited, because the conditions of the bond are not met (usually by the defendant not appearing in court when summoned). Collateral could be just one asset, or it could be a number of assets which combine to make a large amount of money. It doesn't really matter, as long as the bail bondsman can cover their risk and make sure that whatever happens, they won't be losing money. Collateral is an extremely important part of the bail bond process, and it is very common in high profile cases, where extremely large sums of money involved. For example, when dealing with federal bail bonds, which are normally huge, a nebia hearing is required to ensure that the collateral is sufficient to cover the amount of the bond. You have to remember here that bailing someone out of jail is risky, and the state does not see it as something which "should" happen, they would much rather the criminal stayed behind bars until the case was heard.

Collecting together the collateral you need shouldn't be too difficult, and the bail bondsman will often help you do this. However, it isn't something you should rush into, because people have put their houses on the line and eventually lost them purely because they didn't stop to think about what they were doing.