In my experience, how the bill collecting works from the creditor's point of view (collection supervisor or collection attorney), is that there are so many files to deal with for collecting funds, that if someone is paying anything ..even $5.00 a month...that file usually gets put to the bottom of the pile, because there is "activity" on it.
At the first of each month, or at whatever interval the files are reviewed, collector looks to see if there were any payments...if no payments for a certain # of months, goes into "we need to do something" pile. If there is a payment of any kind, the file usually goes back to the bottom of the pile. I would suspect that if the collector wasn't overworked the small payment thing wouldn't work, but I've never know of a collection office that had enough staff. Small regular payments usually work.
Angie1953