A few days ago I completed a workout that can only be described as a marathon negotiation.

My client signed on with Second Wind in January of 2009 and just now is reaching his conclusion.  It has been a knock down, drag out, up hill battle the whole way.  No one wanted to be the guy that let the guarantor get away, despite mountains of tangible proof to demonstrate his inability to pay.  In his case we went one step further and outlined the costs and benefits of collection to also show why there was nothing to be gained in the legal arena.

However this client had fallen into one of the many holes in the workout process.  Bankers for some reason believe that if you have a smaller debt load, (smaller in this case was still hundreds of thousands), you need to pay a higher percentage.  Now any reasonable human being would look at the logic behind that statement and say, “Well that doesn’t make any sense.  The size of his debt does not change how much cash he has in his pocket.”  Unfortunately that takes common sense and real logic.  Both are items that are in short supply even when the banker is extremely smart.  For some reason, in the banking world the same rules do not seem to apply.

My client was asked for documents dozens of times, most of the documents were the same item over and over again.  He was forced to wait for over a year in just the Offer in Compromise step of our process and in the end he did budge a little bit and added a few thousand dollars to his offer, but we did not shift and our result was the bank coming down near our number, not negotiating against ourselves.

My client was overjoyed with the result and walked away from hundreds of thousands of dollars.  He is just as happy today with his debt freedom as he would have been a year ago.  The ability to get up in the morning and not have to think about the crushing weight of his obligations is something he was promised when he signed on and because of his trust and conviction in Second Wind, he got the result he was promised.

This is a wonderful success story and a good example of a client who stuck to his guns.  He was successful because he never caved in or ran away to file a bankruptcy.