personal negotiation

[doctorv]

I am scheduled to meet with bk attorney tomorrow.
This is our first meeting to determine my options.

I was wondering if anyone has tried to negotiate with
credit card companies on their own to work out percentage
repayment or something to that effect.

I have loads of debt but the credit card debt(100K) and one (very) upside down car loan (owe 22K worth 14-15K) are my primary concerns.

Have toyed around with contacting everyone myself and saying these are your choices (in a very matter of fact and non threatening way).

A. deal with me
B. deal with my bk lawyer
C. still working on C

Any thoughts?

Have as good a day as possible

[BrokeCh7]

My 2 cents on this

Before my BK

I was curent on all cards even on the car loan and could see the boulder rolling at me. So instead of letting it crush me i thought "why not give my cc's a call and see if we could do something to solve the problem"

The answner was "Well you are current now it dose not look like you are having any problems paying." so on and so on.

The boulder crushed me and was now rolling past me. I stopped payin all cards and after the 4th month all the offers came in. All by mail I had stopped answnering the phone at this time too. They started at 50% off and some even went as far as 30% 5 to 6 months after not paying and not replying to any thing they sent. The biggest problem was the cc companies where not interested in talking to me when i was current and only after i was past due did they open up and start talking. But at this time i was sunk with the only way to get out was bk.

Good Luck

[HHM]

Yeah, generally, you need to be in serious default before they will deal with you. Also, they generall do not want to negotiate payments, they want a lump sum.

[doctorv]

That is pretty much what I thought.
My plan is to bypass the nasty phone calls
and just do the bankruptcy thing.

I am current on everything but, I see the
writing on the wall or the oncoming boulder
however you want to look at it.

Thank you for the reply.

[cloudship]

In my case, the credit card companies would only give me a "deal" by agreeing to go into scheduled payments that were HIGHER than what I was supposed to be paying. They would still report it to the credit bureaus, and wanted money up front. I had expected a few of them to offer somethign a little better (perhaps cutting down on how much I owe or at least refunding high interest fees) but they wrote off the account instead. I am not 100% convinced some of the companies are really that interested in helping out or even seeing that they get any money at all. They are more interested in trying to sell their payment plans.