Texas Order Granting Motion to Open Safe Deposit Box and Examine Papers

Come to the bank with your safe deposit box key. You will need to sign an admission slip to get access to the Safe Deposit area of the vault. A Safe Deposit Area attendant will take you to the vault. With the bank's Guard Key and your key, open your Safe Deposit Box slot.

Banks can't deny access to a safe deposit box to an authorized person. While they may keep records of who accessed the box, they don't know who is the actual owner of its contents.In any case, keep detailed records of the box's contents, the bank's contact information and the box number you rented.

Authorized signature: When the safe deposit account is opened, all persons authorized to access the box sign a signature card. The bank allows only those individuals to open the box. From then on, the bank records the signature of any individual allowed to open the box.

Contrary to popular wisdom, the terms of a safe deposit box agreement with a financial institution typically describe a lessor/lessee relationship. As a result, most safe deposit box agreements only govern the use of the box; they do not govern the ownership of its contents.

While creditors can seize a safe deposit box, this is usually a last resort and requires obtaining a judgement and placing a lien on your personal property. The creditor then has to locate your safe deposit box and have the approval to seize and liquidate it.

In addition to freezing accounts, levying accounts, garnishing wages, and seizing assets, the IRS can get a court order to freeze and seize or force a sale of the contents of a safe deposit box to satisfy a tax debt or penalty.

The contents of a safe-deposit box is vulnerable to creditors who have judgments, the same way that a checking or savings account is vulnerable.

What happens to items in a safety deposit box when a bank goes bankrupt? If you are paying for the box, The FDIC (or other agencies) will transfer that box to a different bank. Your box stays in the same branch, Its just a different bank who take it over.

If you did not pay the annual fee on the safe deposit box, it likely would have been considered dormant once there was no activitysuch as payment of the feefor three to five years. The length of time necessary to declare a box dormant is defined by state statute.