Without the unspoken threat that the consumer could at any point play the bankruptcy
card and walk away from every last unsecured credit card debt sum, the borrowers are also essentially disallowed from the hotly touted settlement negotiation route toward debt relief often before the poorer families, unfamiliar with consumer finance, had even heard of the program. Settlement negotiation, the most popular and successful of all of the new debt relief alternatives, works its magic by reducing the credit card debt loads of the borrowers to a more manageable state for the benefit of all parties involved by exploiting the lenders' fears of bankruptcy. It might sound odd to say that consumers would ever wish that they'd kept the specter of bankruptcy protection hanging over their family's imminent plans. Nevertheless, as we've hopefully demonstrated, many consumers learn only too late that they never appreciated the power of Chapter 7 debt relief until it was taken away.