if a persons property has a lien on it, can they sell the property and pay off their lien debts using all of that money?

NO they cannot sell a property with a lien on it because they do not hold title to it.

Now they can make it impossible for that property to change hands with the lien on it. The purpose of the lien isn't to take the property away from you, but to prevent the sale of the property without a portion of the revenue should the property sale going to the lien holder.

If you are going through this and asking personally, my advice is to pay the lien off through unsecured channels. For instance:

My favorite way to pay off debt obligations on property is to pay the property debt obligation off using unsecured debt obligations (such as credit cards), and then defaulting on the credit cards.

Legally, there's nothing the credit card companies can do since the debt is unsecured. So you've just accumulated full rights to an asset and the debt is written off by the credit company.

Even better. Once the debt of paying off through unsecure credit hits collections, they offer a payoff. Offer 25 to 50% of the debt total, under the written obligation that they will not report you to the credit bureaus, and pay that debt with another credit card.

Wash rinse, repeat, and you'll pay literally pennies on the dollar for your assets and have stellar credit to boot.

AIG did this with CDO's - collateralized debt obligations - they effectively sold the debt obligations to a japanese company who knew full well what they were getting into and did it anyways. This gave AIG and in effect - the banks - and private equity shareholders - full rights to the titles of the houses they held and removed ALL debt obligations for those properties.

You, too, as a consumer can learn from the banks.

And don't you feel one bit guilty about what you're doing.

Who do you think they took all that money from in the first place?

YOU. The consumer.

Short answer: Yes. Long answer: When the property is sold, the lien is paid from the proceeds before the seller gets a dime. If the selling price is less than the lien amount, the property cannot be sold.

Sure they can. The closing agent -- typically a title company or an attorney -- pays off the liens before any remaining funds are distributed to the seller.

This happens thousands of times every day. Most properties sold have a mortgage lien against them and all of those mortgages are retired as part of the closing process. I've sold over a dozen homes and every one of them had an existing mortgage that was paid off as part of the closing process.

No.

I work at a loan office. Occasionally yes, we do have to take people to court for not paying. When we do that, we get a lien on their home (if they own). When they pay us, we send a satisfaction of judgement. They need to take the satisfaction paperwork down to the courthouse to remove the judgement/lien. Until they do that, the lien stays. I cannot tell you how many times people have ignored the paperwork they need to take to the courthouse, then come scrambling in here to get it because they are trying to sell their house and the lien pops up and they get told they have to take care of it first.

All of the liens against the property have to be paid and removed before it can be sold.

Yes, that is the point of the lien, it gets paid before the owner gets any proceeds of sale.

The property cannot be sold with a lien on it. Any liens must first be paid off.

Ofcourse yes

sure....especially if the buyer demand a cleaqn title before forking over the money