Our team at Alpha Bonding understands that it is a difficult experience to be arrested and sent to jail, or to have a loved one go through that. If a loved one is in jail, then you will understandably want to get them out as soon as possible. The standard mechanism for doing this is to pay bail, but you may not be able to afford the bail amount.
In that situation, you can turn to a bail bonds company like ours to help bridge that gap and get your loved one out. There are multiple types of bail bonds, and in this article, we will be going over the specifics of one of them, namely surety bail bonds. Read on to find out more about how they work.
To explain how a surety bail bond works, it’s useful to start by going over how cash bonds work. Cash bonds are just what they sound like: a cash amount that the court holds until the trial is completed, as a way to make sure you show up for your court dates. If you do show up when you’re supposed to, you will get the bail money back at the end of the proceedings.
Compared to a cash bond, a surety bail bond is more complicated, as it involves more people. In surety bonds, the defendant asks a bond company to pay the full amount of their bail in exchange for a nonrefundable premium (usually about 10% of the total cost). The bondsman then borrows the other 90% from a surety company. If you go this route, you will usually be asked to provide some collateral as well, such as your home or car, as a way to offset the risk to the bond company.