No, You're Not Out Of Order

In the technical language of the Personal Property Security Act (the "PPSA")¹, a secured party requires both attachment and perfection to obtain a perfected security interest that has priority over third parties. In simpler language this means that, in most cases², a secured party must obtain a signed security agreement from its debtor and also register a financing statement in the appropriate Personal Property Registry to perfect its security interest.

That's not so hard to do. And it's even easier than that, because the order in which those two things happen does not matter. In fact, there is a significant benefit to a secured party registering a financing statement before a security agreement is even signed. Why? Because priority between competing security interests that are perfected by registration is determined by the order of registration of the financing statements, without regard to when the signed security agreement is actually obtained. Therefore, if a