MBNA - Why are they being nice to me?

Legacy_user

Hi - thought I post this separately to the main thread I've used before.

I'm still trying to negotiate with my Credit Card creditors to accept token payments of £1 per month until my financial circumstances improve.

None have so far accepted my offer (but I obviously still pay them £1 a month anyway) but this last week MBNA have started being very nice to me!

I owe them £10k and they've already put a freeze on any charges and interest on the a/c.

They've now sent me two letters, the first saying that they'll consider a reduced settlement offer (I was amazed by this as it's not even 2 months since I defaulted) and the second saying they may write off all interest and charges for the last year if I can pay some more money.

Personally, I think these are simply attempts to get me to pay more money in addition to the token payment I'm making. I'm not daft and can recognise when someone's trying to dangle a carrot in front of me . I also think they may be a last-ditch attempt before MBNA sells my a/c on to a Debt Collection Agency.

But I was curious as to whether this is a standard MBNA ploy?

Dave

Hobo17

I had read horror stories about MBNA too - but they were fine with me, one of the better ones. They wrote to me offering reduced settlement figures and seemed happier to let it rest for a while than some other cos who issued me with defaults and called me 6 times a day! I ended up 4 months in arrears (had been making reduced payments in that time) and they seemed to alternate between sending me statements as normal (saying my minimum payment was overdue) and sending me the offers of reduced settlement. They did ignore my letter saying "I can't afford to pay the full amount, please accept a token payment for the moment" but then so did most of the credit card companies!

System

Hobo17 wrote:

They wrote to me offering reduced settlement figures

Hobo - do you mean they actually gave you a settlement figure themselves? I thought the general rule was you give them a figure and then you both do alot of haggling until you agree.

Hobo17

Sorry, I can't remember the actual wording of the letter. It arrived after payplan had notified them that I was entering an IVA (my settlement figure offered was about 30p in the pound), it said something along the lines of "we may be able to offer you a discount if you are able to settle the balance outstanding". I also had one call from them where they asked if I could borrow "the majority" of the money from someone which led me to believe they might be open to negotiation on a settlement (not that I could offer them one!) once I had told them that I had no chance of paying the whole balance off. The debt was eventually passed to a debt collection agency who have never contacted me and didn't bother to vote at my creditors meeting this morning.