MCA Resolution Timing
How Position Shifts From 45 Days Past Due Toward Post Judgment

An older MCA balance carries no predictable discount, and the calendar confers no entitlement the contract did not already contain.

Time changes the parties involved, the procedural posture, and the amount claimed, and none of those changes arrives with a percentage attached. A debt described as old may contain a recent event that demands immediate action, while a fresh default may already sit with counsel. The age that matters is measured from documents rather than from memory, and no honest average spans the distance between one file and the next.

What follows maps position rather than prices, because position is what the calendar actually moves.

Forty Five Days Past Due: The Funder Holds the Debits

In the first weeks after missed debits, the original funder typically retains the account with its collection tools intact, including ACH access and the contractual remedies the agreement provides. The posture favors the funder, and proposals made in this window are evaluated against the ease of continued collection rather than against any hardship the owner describes.

Mark every date on one page.

The missed debit, the notices received, any response sent, and the date of any reconciliation request each belong on a single chronology, since thirty days after a failed debit is not necessarily thirty days after contractual default. A demand may identify a different triggering event. That silence is administrative rather than merciful, and the owner who reads quiet weeks as tolerance misreads the file.

Do not delay a response in order to reach a supposedly better settlement window. Waiting without a defined reason can narrow the choices available before anyone has discussed a reduction.

Ninety Days Past Due: The File Changes Hands

Ninety days after the first missed debit, the question is no longer whether the account is delinquent but who owns the delinquency, and ownership by this point has often moved or is preparing to move, which introduces a new correspondent, a new balance calculation, and a new set of procedural habits the owner must learn while the old debits continue. The owner studies the new office while the balance continues its own education.

The account was, to use the funder's term rather than mine, charged off in some files by this stage, though the technical charge off status describes accounting treatment rather than forgiveness, and collection or assignment can proceed exactly as before under a different letterhead. In most files we have seen, though the sample is not scientific, the balance claimed at transfer exceeds the figure the owner last saw, swollen by fees and charges the notices itemize unevenly.

But the balance is no longer the number the funder first demanded, and the owner who anchors on the original figure will misjudge every proposal built on the current one. Request the balance history from origination with every adjustment shown, and compare the claimed total against the debits the bank records confirm.

Old debt has a smell, and experienced collectors recognize it the way a superintendent recognizes a leaking pipe: before anyone files a complaint. The advantage owners imagine they gain by waiting usually belongs to the party with the cleaner file.

One Hundred Eighty Days Past Due: Litigation Posture

By the sixth month, the dispute often acquires a procedural shape that earlier negotiation lacked. Filings may have issued, response deadlines may control the calendar, and the cost of defense enters the settlement arithmetic on both sides.

Counsel should be engaged before this stage rather than during it. Any acknowledgment of the debt, even briefly worded, should pass through counsel first; ask counsel to ensure the governing law on limitations and revival is identified before anything is signed or acknowledged. Resist the urge to answer a complaint with a phone call to the funder's office.

Seldom does a complaint arrive with a complete payment history attached. The pleading states a balance whose proof remains negotiable.

After Judgment: Interest and Enforcement

A judgment converts the dispute into an enforceable obligation with tools the prejudgment creditor lacked, and settlement practice continues after entry, since judgment creditors routinely negotiate over payment against the cost and delay of enforcement. Post judgment negotiation is a real and documented phase rather than an afterthought, though its mechanics differ entirely from the earlier discussion.

Under New York CPLR provisions on interest upon judgment, every money judgment bears interest from the date of entry, and the companion section stating the rate of interest sets a general annual figure while carving out a lower rate for consumer debt defined around personal, family, or household purposes (the lower figure, added by amendment in recent years, does not describe a business MCA obligation, and counsel should confirm the current text with extremely close attention before relying on any rate printed here, since revisions have moved these sections before). The balance therefore grows during any delay the owner treats as neutral.

Whether courts outside New York apply the same post judgment mechanics is beyond the sources reviewed for this article. Vacatur practice, enforcement tools, and interest rules each answer to the forum that issued the judgment, and the file must be read where it lives rather than where the business operates.

Timing Review With Delancey Street

The advice given in week six is rarely the advice that would have been given in week two. That still preoccupies me.

Delancey Street offers a free confidential initial review of MCA timing and settlement questions. It is a settlement company rather than a law firm, and legal matters are handled by independently licensed counsel, whether counsel the owner retains or counsel the company coordinates.

You wait for a better offer and then you discover that waiting was the offer. Steps the owner takes, or does not take, in the first weeks after default will determine which options survive into the later stages, so simply assemble the chronology now, with the agreement, the notices, and a threadbare payment printout from the bank. Counsel should ensure deadlines are calendared against the verified dates, with no proposal evaluated against a stale balance without the adviser's confirmation.

An extremely patient negotiator with a file gone stale still needs current numbers, because time heals nothing in a collection file. Time also settles more accounts than any negotiator. Actions filed against the business will test the documents rather than the months behind them, and the calendar that matters is the one the court keeps.