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Georgia MCA relief: the options that exist, the ones that do not, and what each one costs you

The advance is taken out of your operating account every banking day, and it is taken first. Rent, fuel, payroll and your subs all queue behind it. Most Georgia owners in default did not stop paying. They took a second advance to keep the first one current, and the combined daily draw outran the deposits. Construction and the trades make up about a quarter of the Georgia borrowers who end up here, with retail and healthcare at roughly 18 percent each. Different industries, identical mechanism.

Georgia gives you a narrower set of options than the guides written for New York suggest, and one broader one they never mention. The rate argument is close to dead here. The disclosure statute that took effect on January 1, 2024 is alive, and so is the county-level lien file almost nobody checks.

The five options actually on the table in Georgia

Owners arrive believing there are two choices, pay or fold. There are five, and they are not equally good.

Reconciliation. Your contract almost certainly promises an adjustment when receipts fall. Invoke it in writing, with bank statements attached. A funder that ignores the request has breached its own paper, and that letter becomes the opening exhibit in every negotiation that follows.

Settlement. A negotiated payoff for less than the balance. Georgia files land in a 40 to 55 percent band. One $42,000 retail advance closed at $18,900, which is 45 cents on the dollar and $23,100 that stayed in the business.

Restructure. The daily debit becomes weekly or monthly at a longer term. Cheaper in cash flow, not in total cost. Useful when revenue is recovering rather than gone.

Defense. Contest the structure, the lien, or the judgment. This is legal work, and it is the option a settlement company cannot reach.

Wind-down or bankruptcy. Correct when the personal guarantee exposure already exceeds anything the business can produce.

Refinancing into a sixth advance is not on the list. That is how a $42,000 problem becomes a $160,000 one.

What Georgia's disclosure law requires a funder to tell you

Senate Bill 90 passed in 2023 and created O.C.G.A. §§ 10-1-393.18 and 10-1-393.19, effective January 1, 2024, applying to transactions consummated on or after that date.

Before you sign, the provider must disclose the total funds provided, the total funds disbursed, the total amount to be paid to the provider, the total dollar cost, the manner and frequency and amount of each payment, and any prepayment cost or discount. Pull your funding paperwork and check line by line. Several firms publishing Georgia guidance claim the statute requires an annual percentage rate. It does not. Reciting a disclosure duty that Georgia never enacted tells you the page was written by someone who never opened the bill.

Enforcement sits with the Attorney General under subsection (g), not with the Department of Banking and Finance. That department licenses mortgage lenders, money transmitters, check cashers and installment lenders. Merchant cash advance providers are not on its list. Nobody in Atlanta is examining your funder's books, which is exactly why the private leverage in your own contract matters more here.

Why the interest rate argument fails on a Georgia advance

Georgia's only civil rate ceiling is 16 percent, and O.C.G.A. § 7-4-2(a)(2) stops it at $3,000 of principal. Above $3,000 the parties may set any rate by written contract, and § 7-4-2(a)(1)(B) says the same thing again above $250,000. A $60,000 advance has no civil cap in this state. If a firm opens your call with a 16 percent number, it is quoting a statute that does not reach your deal.

One ceiling does survive. O.C.G.A. § 7-4-18 makes it a misdemeanor to reserve, charge or take more than 5 percent per month, which is 60 percent a year, and it names the dodges: commission for advances, discount, exchange, any contrivance whatsoever. The remedy under § 7-4-10 is forfeiture of the interest, pleadable as a setoff against principal. Not treble damages. Not cancellation of the debt.

So do not build the file on the rate. Build it on structure, on the lien, and on the reconciliation clause the funder wrote itself.

Your UCC-1 is sitting in a county clerk's office, not in Atlanta

Georgia does not file UCC-1 financing statements with the Secretary of State. Under O.C.G.A. § 11-9-501, they go to the clerk of the superior court of any county in the state. Any of the 159. The clerk transmits to the statewide index maintained by the Georgia Superior Court Clerks' Cooperative Authority, and filing in one county gives notice everywhere.

The practical consequence lands on you. A funder in Cobb County can perfect against your Savannah operation by filing in a county you have never driven through, and a lien search limited to your home county comes back clean while a blanket filing sits on your receivables. Search the statewide index, not the courthouse down the road.

Terminating the filing has its own trigger. Under § 11-9-513 the twenty day clock does not begin when the settlement funds clear. It begins when the secured party receives a signed demand from the debtor. Georgia writes signed demand where the uniform text says authenticated. Send the demand, keep proof of delivery, and put the termination in the settlement agreement rather than chasing it afterward.

What the help costs, and what the fee is charged against

Category fees run 15 to 25 percent. The basis decides the bill. A fee on enrolled debt is measured against everything you bring in. A fee on the settled amount is measured against what you actually pay. On $80,000 enrolled and settled at 45 cents, 20 percent of enrolled debt is $16,000 and 20 percent of the settlement is $7,200.

Three questions settle the comparison. Is anything due before a settlement closes. Is there a monthly administrative or escrow charge riding on top. Will the firm put the fee basis in writing before you sign. A structure that pays only on a closed settlement puts the firm on your side of the table.

Weigh the fee against the discount rather than against your bank balance. On the $42,000 retail file that closed at $18,900, the reduction was $23,100, and the daily debit stopped while the negotiation ran.

What to do in the next seven days

Pull every advance agreement, including the ones you signed on a phone. Pull ninety days of bank statements with the debits highlighted. Pull any default or demand letter. Then run a statewide UCC search rather than a county one, and write down every secured party you find.

If your advance was consummated on or after January 1, 2024, compare the funding paperwork against the six disclosures § 10-1-393.18 requires. Missing items are worth knowing before anyone picks up the phone to a funder.

Do not sign a new advance to cover an old one. Do not close the account the debits hit without advice, because a funder will read it as a breach and accelerate. Send the reconciliation request in writing this week, dated, with the statements attached. Then have someone who reads these contracts daily tell you which of the five options your paperwork actually supports.