Rule 90.01.Definitions.

Garnishment law leans on a small set of terms, and Rule 90.01 pins them down before the rest of Rule 90 puts them to work. A garnishor is the person owed money under a judgment — the judgment creditor. The debtor is the person who owes it. The garnishee is whoever gets served with the writ: a bank holding the debtor’s account, an employer holding the debtor’s wages, or anyone else holding money or property that belongs to the debtor. Keeping these three roles straight matters because each one carries different duties under the rules that follow.

“Property subject to garnishment” casts a wide net — goods, personal property, money, credits, bonds, notes, checks, choses in action, and any debt owed to the debtor. But the rule carves out one important category: money in a bank account is not reachable if every dollar in that account arrives by recurring electronic deposit and is reasonably identifiable as a type of deposit that state or federal law already protects from garnishment. That carve-out matters most for accounts that receive automatic deposits of protected benefits, since it keeps a garnishee bank from having to sort exempt money out of a mixed account after the fact.

The rule also introduces continuous wage garnishment — a garnishment of earnings that never gets a return date. Instead of expiring after a set period, it stays in force until the debtor’s employer pays the judgment off in full or the debtor stops working there, whichever happens first. That single definition shapes the timing rules found throughout the rest of Rule 90, since a continuous wage garnishment runs on a different clock than a garnishment with a fixed return date.