Debt Relief

Like digestive relief, only with your finances (and with similar physical manifestations).

If your debt levels get out of control (See: Debt Load), it can become crushing. Too much interest to be paid on too big a loan. At a certain point, you can't afford to do anything but pay interest on the debts you have. You can't reduce the total you owe by any appreciable amount, because you're barely making minimum payments. Meanwhile, you can't afford to do much else.

Debt relief helps get you out of the mess.

The most extreme form of debt relief is bankruptcy, the financial equivalent of a do-over. In Ye Olde Dayze, you'd go to prison if you had to declare bankruptcy. Today, you just go to a new bank. There exist options short of that extreme, however. Lenders offer debt restructuring services that make management of existing debt easier to handle. "In return for our owning 20% of the equity in your company, we'll re-issue the $100 million you owe us and reset the interest rate from 7% to 3% for 4 years until you get some steam and mojo going in the business." Something like that, anyway.

In general, debt relief programs involve spreading out payments over a longer period of time, and via paying less rent or interest on the dough...so that the monthly debt service becomes easier to digest. The financial reset can also involve forgiving some part of the debt, the idea being that giving up some of the money owed will be worth more to the lender than forcing the borrower into bankruptcy.

Bottom line: You don't want to go there. Just pay what you owe; owe what you pay. (We think Gandhi said that. But it might have been Trump.)