[h2odragon]

Wife and I tried to start a business a couple years ago; ran onto circumstances that made it difficult, went bankrupt. We talked to all our credit card issuers about our troubles beforehand, trying to get some better option than "just stop paying"; they were not interested.

Discover actually laughed at my wife when she asked about it: "you're not even delinquent yet!" We were going to be the next day, and would've liked to negotiate before that point. They have no systems for that nor (apparently) any ability to recognize it.

Their comfort zone is this system of debt collections.

[SoftTalker]

They don't have the people, systems, or process to deal with individually negotiated delinquincy plans. They have batch jobs that run daily, if you miss your payment date they hit you with a late fee, then another one in another 30 days, and maybe after 90 days they will close the account and sell the debt. That's all they do, it's strictly based on dates and payments.

You'd think with all the personal profile data they're able to buy and collect themselves, they could identify the accounts that are just in a temporary bind vs. those that are going to be long-term problems. But AFAICT they don't do this.

[mistrial9]

you dealt with your creditors in a way that a responsible business owner (or farmer) would do it -- like adults dealing with bad news in a long-term relationship. A difference though, is that in consumer credit cards, the scale of the offering made it a whole-new situation. The people you talked to are low-training cogs, and there is almost zero sense of relationship at the scale of consumer credit like that. The people at the top of the consumer credit business were making more money than almost anything in the entire economy, and definitely had no time or consideration for a single small business.

The plus side is that you and your wife were able to access credit very easily compared to the past, the downside is that when you tried to treat it like a long-term relationship, it was shocking how not like that it was. don't change!

[h2odragon]

Among our creditors was also a local bank (whose customers include a lot of farmers); they were willing to discuss things with us. We managed to pay them off (with a few months of forbearance) and continue doing business with them.

Lovely folks there, I fear the day they get bought up and turn bad.

[latchkey]

I had a lot of debt on a Discover card once. I can't remember the exact circumstances, but I do remember that they were awful and will never use that company again.