Does consolidation save money? —
the math on a real offer.

The short answer: a consolidation almost never lowers what you pay in total. What's left on a merchant cash advance is a fixed amount. Unlike a loan, there's no interest building up that paying early would save — unless your contract gives an early-payoff discount. A consolidation adds its own cost on top. What it changes is when you pay: less now, more later.

Whether that trade is worth it depends on the details. So here's a real one, with every number shown.

The file: four advances, $585.86 a day

This is a real reverse-consolidation offer on a business carrying four merchant cash advances. The lenders' names are removed; the numbers aren't.

Together that's $585.86 every business day, with $41,545 left across all four. Paid as agreed, the last one finishes in about 19 weeks. Notice that they don't all finish together: Advance D is gone in 7 weeks, A and B in 17. That detail turns out to matter more than anything else.

The offer: 20% off the daily

In a reverse consolidation, the new funding company doesn't pay the advances off. Instead it deposits, every week, exactly what those four advances will debit that week, until each one is finished. The business pays back one new daily payment instead.

The terms on this one:

• New daily payment: $468.69 — 20% less than $585.86, so $117.17 less every business day.
• Total funding: $43,622.25 — the $41,545 in balances plus a 5% fee.
• Payback: funding × the rate. The offer came with a choice of rates from 1.30 to 1.50.

So at any rate, the business pays between about $15,000 and $24,000 more than if it kept paying the four advances. That's the cost. Now the benefit.

What the lower daily is really worth

The headline says $117.17 a day less. But that's only true at the start. The four advances get cheaper as each one finishes: once Advance D is paid off in week 7, the remaining three cost $430.86 a day — less than the new $468.69. The new daily stays the same until its own payback is done.

Here's the cash leaving the business each week, both ways. With the consolidation, the weekly deposits pay the old advances, so the only cash leaving is the new daily.

Read down the last column:

• Weeks 1–7: the consolidation leaves more cash in the business, building to $3,675.95 by week 7.
• Weeks 8–17: the old advances would now cost less than the new payment, so that head start slowly shrinks.
• Week 18 onward: it's gone, and the business has paid more than it would have. From week 20 the old advances would be finished, but the new payment carries on to week 28 at the 1.50 rate.

So on this file, the consolidation buys about $3,700 of breathing room over seven weeks, for $15,000 to $24,000 in total.

The rate doesn't change the relief

This one surprises people. Run the same table at 1.30 and the first 18 weeks are identical: the same $3,675.95 by week 7, the same week 18 when it's used up. The rate only decides how long you keep paying afterwards — week 25 at 1.30, week 28 at 1.50. A lower rate makes the deal cheaper; it doesn't make it more helpful.

What does change the relief is the discount on the daily, and how the old advances are spread out. A file where every advance runs for months gets relief for longer than this one, where the advance that finishes first is also one of the most expensive per day.

So when is it worth it?

When the next few weeks are the problem. Seven weeks of extra cash can carry a business through a seasonal dip, a slow-paying customer, or the gap before a big job pays. And the alternative can be expensive: missing payments on several advances at once can bring returned-payment fees, defaults under each contract, frozen accounts and legal action. Against that, a known cost for known relief can be the right call.

It's the wrong call when:

• Revenue is falling and won't recover. The relief runs out in weeks; the higher total cost doesn't. You've added debt without fixing what caused it.
• Your advances are close to finished. The less time left on them, the less relief there is to buy.
• The money lands in your account to "pay off" the others yourself. That's not a consolidation; it's another advance.

Before signing any consolidation, ask for this comparison week by week, or build it yourself in our consolidation calculator. If the offer only shows you the daily payment, that's the number it wants you to look at — and you now know which ones it doesn't.