I rented my apt. in Miami, FL. The experience was horrible, I finally had to evict the tenant for non payment. The whole eviction cost me $700 plus another $500 for repairs to the apt. Can I legally garnish the tenant wages and how much more will this cost me?
Thank you.

You can but first you have to file suit against them and win a judgement... get a writ of garnishment, once you have that you can try and collect. Problem is THAT is the hard part.

You may spend a big part of that trying to collect. Of course you should be able to write that off as a loss on your taxes.

Someone else will have to answer on rough costs... I've never done that. We've been in that situation as well, we wrote it off because in our case we knew the people and knew actually collecting was going to be more of a fight than it was worth to us.

How much of the security deposit were you able to keep? That should be applied to the damage.

Your eviction judgement should be for whatever rent they owed you at the time of the judgement & all court costs, lawyer's fees, etc. Then, like a pp said, the damages should first come out of their security deposit. Whatever is left over after that you can sue them for in small claims court. THEN once you obtain that judgement you can pursue whatever your state allows for collecting it.

From what you stated in your question, I would think your eviction judgement should already cover the $700 for the eviction. In my opinion, it's probably not worth suing them for $500 in damages, but that's just my opinion. You still have to collect it. It's not like the court does anything to collect or enforce the judgement - they just issue it. AND you'll have to pay more court costs to file it. If you win the case that will be included in the judgement, but still more $$ out of your pocket up front...