When is attempting to recover past rent worthwhile?

[Gualtiero Piccinini]

A tenant who lived in a single family home in South St Louis City moved out in early October while owing, by the most generous estimate, $2,725. She also left a huge amount of items behind, which cost me over $700 to clean up. I do have her phone number, current address (which is in Illinois, however) and SSN. As far as I know she is broke and has no income so I suspect it would be difficult to get any money out of her, unless she gets help from others.

Is this worth pursuing and if so how would you go about it?

[Scott M.]

All depends on state laws that govern this.  A poster I think from the NE I forget what state and don't want to guess told a fantastic story about collecting back rent.  So some states make it easy. Some make it impossible.  It is important to think about the costs of time/effort and what you can realistically do.  Getting a judgement is generally easy.  Collections is the tough part.  So, is your time/effort worth getting the judgement and then turning over to a collections agency?  Or to do nothing?  Or to try and do collections yourself?  What do you need a lawyer for, how much will that cost etc.

It is easy to get lost in the 'but I am owed 2K' and then end up spending more than that in your time and effort.  

Look up state laws on collections as there may be simple things you can do to garnish funds.