The North Carolina Bankruptcy Information Blog

You’ve read the headlines. You’ve heard the network commentators. Despite the reported recent economic recovery, post-recessionary American is marked by a new, and troubling, era of economic inequality.

One of the major reasons for the widening gaps between rich and poor is that minimum wage remains at $7.25, the same rate as it was in 2009, despite dramatic rises in the cost of living.

As a result, those in the lowest income brackets face higher bills while the wage floor remains where it was years ago, leaving millions of Americans squeezed under it. But these facts aren’t lost on the experts—from financial insiders to those most financially impacted.…

It would make sense that recent signs of recovering economy would be great news for jobless Americans. But as a report on public polling explains, even though the overall economic picture may be brightening, many job seekers are still very much in the midst of a stark economic haze.

According to a report from The Huffington Post’s Janell Ross, “Economic data suggests the long-stagnant economy may finally be gaining momentum, but Americans aren’t seeing a turnaround yet, according to a pair of newly released polls. The economy — and more specifically the nation’s persistent jobs crisis — remains the number one concern for most Americans, according to a CNN/ORC International poll released Friday.…

“This matter is serious and will cause problems at the job.”

Believe it or not this is exactly what collection representatives from California-based debt collection company, Rincon Debt Management, were asked to tell unassuming Americans each time they attempted to collect on back debts.

But based on a complaint filed by the Federal Trade Commission, often the debtor they were trying to pressure didn’t owe any money at all. In many cases either they had already paid back their debts or never had them to begin with. Unfortunately, some of these people were so afraid of the debt collector calls, they sent Rincon money anyway just to make these types of aggressive calls stop coming.…

In the “new economy,” full of novel financial realities, we often hear a lot about how cash-strapped kids are often coming home to live with and borrow from their better-positioned parents. And now a new report tells us why.

According to a report from the Associated Press, the wealth gap between younger and older Americans has stretched to the widest on record, “worsened by a prolonged economic downturn that has wiped out job opportunities for young adults and saddled them with housing and college debt.”

Based on analysis by the Pew Research Center, the AP says “The typical U.S. household headed by a person age 65 or older has a net worth 47 times greater than a household headed by someone under 35, according to an analysis of census data released Monday.…

The days between Thanksgiving and Christmas had many people wondering where America’s lingering financial issues went as millions of shoppers returned to our nation’s stores, malls and gallerias en masse to take advantage of extreme sales (and savings) and, in doing so, generated the most successful Black Friday for retailers ever.

A new report found that, in fact, retailers seduced shoppers at record rates despite the sluggish economy. “The 3.4 percent increase in same-store sales reported by Thomson Reuters was better than expected — an optimistic sign in an ailing economy. Still, it’s unclear how often people will shop in the upcoming year, a factor that will depend more on whether they find jobs than on how much retailers innovate or drop prices.…

We talk a lot about the dangers of using credit cards, the nation’s plastic pariah that contributes to many living beyond their means, causes people to pay incredibly high interest, and in more cases than we care to share, leads a lot of folks to file for bankruptcy.

And so for the many thousands of you who were hoping to pay off credit cards quickly and easily as your New Year’s resolution, we have some bad news.

Credit is getting easier to get and interest rates are getting even higher in 2012.

According to the consumer information site CreditCards.com, credit card interest rates climbed to record highs last month, reaching an average of 15.22 percent.…

Think your old credit score was bad?

Well, now there’s a new kind of credit score taking center stage…and setting the stage for financial institutions to make even more money off of the poorest Americans.

According to The Huffington Post, “The new CoreScore looks at financial records such as credit card borrowing, bank transactions and mortgage information, much like a traditional FICO credit score. The new rating also examines the kinds of transactions likely to occur at the lower end of the income scale. These include car and rental payments and payday loans. The CoreScore even examines the record for missed child support payments.…

Many are saying global economic events mean that stock market investors had little to be thankful for during this opening to the official holiday season.

According to CNN Money, “The holiday season has officially arrived, but whether investors will have much to be jolly about next week is uncertain, as Europe’s debt woes continue to weigh on the market. Pessimism and optimism over Europe’s debt crisis have been whipsawing stocks for months, and investors will likely continue to react to headline after headline, keeping the market’s roller coaster in high gear. ‘We’ll probably see more fear, carnage and uncertainty,’ said Ethan Anderson, senior portfolio manager at Rehmann Financial.…

We’ve already heard a lot here about “The 99ers,” the long-term unemployed who have not only became a new byproduct of an unprecedented string of Congressional extensions to unemployment benefits, but who have also long-since exhausted the maximum 99 weeks of unemployment benefits available to them in many states in the wake of the recent economic downturn. The group, inauspiciously dubbed “The 99ers” for the remarkable amount of time they went without a job and with benefits, have come to represent the collective face (and plight) of many jobless Americans from across the country, forced to hang on every tea leaf, smoke signal, and whisper from the halls of Congress for signs of a new job plan, a new stimulus package, and more help for the recession-weary.…

Ghosts and goblins and ghouls are normally the horrifying hallmarks of annual Halloween holiday, satisfying generations of trick-or-treaters, horror movie aficionados, and lovers of frightfully fun parties during every seasonal stand.

But in these tough economic times, when consumerism can’t keep up with flagging incomes and mounting debt, the scariest thing about Halloween may be that we spend so much money on it.

A new report reveals a whole industry has emerged to deal with rising demand for costumes and other customary accouterments, raising Halloween-related revenues from around $6 million in 1988 to over $6 billion in 2011.

“Temporary Halloween stores have boomed in the years since the Sears experiment, growing in the past 10 years at a faster rate than spending for the holiday.…

Despite recent findings that the number one thing Americans waste their money on is eating out, a new survey provides the proverbial “food for thought” to those who believe they are struggling alone in their own personal financial crisis.

A report from Seattle Weekly finds that more than half of all Americans say they’ve recently gone a year without dining out, in what may be one of the clearest signs of how the current economic malaise is impacting our ability to consume even the most basic luxury choices. In fact, according to recently released figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, only 49.3 percent of adults say they “dined out” between fall 2009 and fall 2010, accounting for the lowest percentage of people eating at restaurants since 2007, when just 48.7 percent of adults said they did so.…

We talk a lot here about the trials and travails of underemployment, a perpetual condition of post-recessionary America, in which many, if not most, workers face stagnant wages and/or part-time jobs that fail to keep up with the rising cost of living in the new economy.

In particular, retail workers struggle for hours amid a weak economic recovery, clamoring for extra work in this lower-skilled and paying field. In fact, according to a new article by The Huffington Post, the difference between full and part-time employment can often be the difference between eking out a living or earning a quick trip into insolvency.…

Since the real estate reckoning of 2007 launched what would become a global economic meltdown, average Americans just like you have been taking advantage of the sure-fire safe havens of personal bankruptcy. But part of successfully joining the more than 1.5 million people who will file in 2011, is planning for life following the fruition of that bankruptcy.

In fact, with so many people facing income deficiencies due to underemployment or unemployment in 2011, it’s work revisiting the best advice for an effective bankruptcy. Here’s part two of a two-part series picking up where we left off with the TOP TEN tips for making a 2011 bankruptcy work for you:

(6) Calling All Lenders.…

It’s not too terribly surprising that pawn shops have done very well in the wake of the economic downturn.  With more and more average Americans stuck at the lower end of the income spectrum due to the new economy’s trademark unemployment and underemployment, a great many average Americans were forced to rely regularly on consumer credit to pay for their everyday bills, goods and services.

As a result, pawn shops have thrived throughout the recent economic malaise, providing the industry with new, low risk opportunities at the [literal] expense of unwary borrowers who will avoid defaulting on this type debt at all costs—just so they can keep this credit in an uncertain economic environment.…

If it seems like it’s been a while since we’ve talked about the rising cost of health care, that’s because up until this year, these mounting medical costs had leveled.

But in the new America, it seems you can’t keep a high cost down.

In reality, the costs of employer-sponsored health insurance surged during 2011, cutting short a timely trend toward only “moderate growth.” According to a report released this week by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust, annual premiums for family coverage climbed 9 percent and surpassed $15,000 for the first time. Premiums for single coverage rose 8 percent compared to 2010.…

Need signs that credit card companies are getting more aggressive with their credit card tactics and tricks? Well, there’s 346 million reasons from one particular credit card purveyor, Citigroup.

Based on a new report from The Wall Street Journal, in the third quarter alone, the bank mailed more than 346 million credit card offers to unwitting customers. Keep in mind, that’s more than the approximately 308 million people in the U.S, according to the Census Bureau.

Despite this high volume of consumer credit offers, according to the financial experts at Bloomberg, revolving credit usage, which includes credit cards, dropped the most in six months in July.…

For many recent graduates from colleges and universities all across the country, any job must feel better than no job at all. Shortly after graduation in May 2011, thousands of grads from Washington State to UNC-Wilmington, turned their back on student life and turned back on their computers only to begin their first official job searches—sending out e-mail-loads of resumes in what would become for many a months-long search for work….any work.

Once the summer had started in earnest many of this newly-minted workforce found that they had applied for dozens, if not hundreds of positions, only to hear back from a handful of potential employers, most of whom would likely reject them about as quickly as these same students were running through their bank accounts, savings, leftover student loans or whatever their parents could provide, during only the very beginnings of what would become an entire season of  just job searching.…

A fascinating new article from The Associated Press reveals that the one of the toughest challenges facing unemployed Americans isn’t a job market currently stagnated at 9.1 percent unemployment rate, or even that 14 million unemployed are competing with each other in a country that posted no new jobs in August; rather the AP says the most challenging thing the unemployed are currently contending with is the underemployed.

Underemployed workers, 8.8 million other people not counted as unemployed, but rather part-timers who want full-time work, will be first in line for more hours when the consumer spending picks up this holiday season, negating the need for most employers to add jobs—positions that so many jobless Americans are relying on to make it out of their own Great Recession.…

About a year ago, we reported that North Carolina was at the “top of the heap,” when it came to being home to one of the ten best cities to find jobs. Despite the fact that millions of struggling Americans were still working hard to find employment, economists were heartened about prospects for growth in 2012 as industries increasingly reported better profits and adding new jobs. As a result, back then, cities like Durham, N.C., which had rebounded with more jobs post-recession based on gains in the tech industries, looked like beacons of hope for a new economic recovery.

But now we’re forced to fast-forward to 2011, and Friday’s news that the United States failed to add any jobs in August.…

As things heat up in the waning days of summer, the job growth cooled down in August, with the U.S. economy picking up [read my lips:] no new jobs in August as the unemployment rate stayed steady at 9.1 percent. These figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Friday now stand as the most clear and present symbol yet of a stalled economic recovery that has the words “double-dip recession” written all over it.

According to a new report from The Huffington Post, Wells Fargo economist John Silvia doesn’t believe the United States is currently in a recession now, but  he “wouldn’t be surprised if the economy enters into a recession in the near future.…