Listen.
You typed it at the kitchen table. Lights low. Phone face down so you don't see them calling. "How do I stop MCA payments."
I will answer you. Straight. Now.
You can stop the daily draft. Yes. It is possible. You tell your bank, in writing, to revoke the ACH authorization. Three business days before the next pull. That is the rule banks live by, the federal one, Regulation E, the Electronic Fund Transfer Act. You write it. You keep a copy. The bank stops the withdrawal.
So yes. You can make the money stop leaving.
But, no. Listen again.
Stopping the draft is not the same as stopping the debt.
This is the thing nobody tells you in the panic. The withdrawal stops. The contract does not stop.
Most MCA agreements say: if you cut off the payments on your own, that is a default. A breach. And the moment you breach, the whole balance can come due. All at once. Not the daily piece. The whole thing. And then they can sue, file their UCC lien, come after the personal guarantee you signed without reading.
So you have two doors. One door says "stop the money." The other says "stop the trouble." They are not the same door.
Now breathe. Let me show you the doors slowly.
THE FIRST THING, your contract has a word in it. Reconciliation.
Find it. Tonight. Get the PDF. Search the word.
Here is the secret of the merchant cash advance. It is not supposed to be a loan. The funder bought a piece of your future sales. A percentage. That is the whole legal pretense, they are buying receivables, not lending money. And because of that pretense, the good contracts say: if your sales go down, your payment goes down. You ask, they re-figure it against what you actually made. They give back what they over-collected.
That is reconciliation. It is the legal way to lower the payment without breaking anything.
So if your sales have dropped, and you would not be sitting in the dark typing that question if they hadn't, you send the reconciliation request. In writing. With your bank statements. You follow the steps the contract names, exactly. The contract is obligated, if it uses the word "shall," to bring the payment down.
You understand what just happened? You lowered the payment. And you did NOT default. The first door, opened gently, without the alarm going off.
And here is the deeper thing. The thing that turns weakness into a knife.
If you ask for reconciliation and they refuse, if they will not even look at your numbers, if the clause was fake, written so you could never actually use it, written "may" instead of "shall," a decoration and not a right, then their whole story falls apart. Because if they never tie your payment to your real receipts, then they never bought receipts. Then it was a loan all along. A disguised loan. And a disguised loan at MCA pricing is usury. Illegal. In some states, like New York, capped at 25 percent and the contract void above it.
So the refusal you fear becomes the defense you need. You see the paradox? What they do to hurt you can be the thing that frees you. But you cannot see it alone. This is where the lawyer comes in. I will come back to that.
NOW, the thing you were actually about to do. I can feel it.
You were about to close the bank account.
Don't. Not tonight. Not like this.
I know why you want to. The account is the wound. Close the account, close the wound. It feels like control.
But closing the account to dodge the draft, they will call that fraud. Or breach. It lights the fuse on everything. The whole balance accelerates. And it hands them the moral high ground in front of a judge, which is the last thing you want to give away.
There is a softer move. You open a NEW account. Different bank. The MCA does not know it. Your new deposits, your payroll, your rent money, those flow through the new one. The old account stays open, but you keep only a little in it. They can keep reaching into the old one, but the old one is nearly empty. The food is moved off the table they're allowed to reach.
Slow. Quiet. Not a slammed door. A moved plate.
Now. What is real, and what is just them roaring to scare you. Let us separate the two. Because half of what you are afraid of is theater.
THE BLUFF, partly: The calls. The threats. The voice that says they will take everything by Friday. Here is a truth most people don't know, the FDCPA, the federal law that stops abusive debt collectors, does not cover business debt. Yours is business debt. So there is no federal cap on the calls. They lean on this. They call and call because they legally can. It feels like power. Much of it is just noise meant to make you act in fear. Some states have their own rules against unfair business collection. Most of the daily threat is pressure, not power.
THE REAL: They cannot reach into your second account by themselves. Not by ACH. They only have the door you gave them, the authorization on the old account. Another account, another bank, they cannot just pull from it.
But, and hold this carefully, if they SUE, and WIN, and get a judgment, the game changes. With a judgment they can send a restraining notice, freeze accounts, levy, find money through subpoenas to banks. With a judgment and your signature on a personal guarantee, they can come at you, the human being, not just the business. Your personal accounts. A lien docketed against property you own.
Can they take your house? Usually not directly. Not by a draft. Only through a judgment, then a lien, and even then your state's homestead exemption may protect some or all of it. It varies, state to state, wildly. This is exactly the kind of thing you check for YOUR state. Do not assume. Do not assume the worst either.
And the confession of judgment, the COJ, if your contract has one, that lets them skip the lawsuit and go straight to a judgment. Fast. Ugly. Some states have limited them. Some haven't. Another reason the contract matters more than your fear.
So here is what you do. In order. Tonight and tomorrow.
Find the contract. Read the reconciliation clause. Read whether you signed a personal guarantee. Read whether there is a confession of judgment.
Pull your bank statements showing sales went down.
Do not close the account in a panic. Open the second one instead, somewhere else.
Send the reconciliation request the way the contract demands, in writing, keeping every copy.
And then, call a lawyer who does this. MCA defense. Not your cousin who does wills. Someone who has read a hundred of these contracts and knows the bluff from the blade. Before you revoke the ACH. Before. Because the order of the moves decides whether you walk out clean or hand them a default.
One more thing, and then I let you sleep.
When you wrote "the payments are more than I make", "this is killing my business", you weren't just complaining. You were describing a possibly broken deal. A payment unhooked from your actual sales is the exact signature of a loan wearing a costume. That sentence may be your defense. Say it to the lawyer in those words.
You are not the first to sit at this table in the dark. The roar is loud. The path is narrow but it is there. Walk it in order. Slow. Documented. Witnessed.
A small honest word, because I will not lie to you: This is not legal advice. I have not read your contract. I do not know your state. Everything here bends to what you actually signed and where you actually live. The whole point is, go find someone who can read those two things and tell you the truth about yours.
But the money leaving every morning? That can stop. Just stop it the right way. You understand? The right way.
This is the work Delancey Street does: a business-debt-only firm, attorney-backed, that settles merchant cash advance debt on a performance basis, with no fee until a settlement exists. The first call is a diagnosis, not a commitment, and it costs nothing.