The North Carolina Bankruptcy Information Blog

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 best holiday gift may have been a private sector hiring surge in December 2011, as employers gifted the American job market with 325,000 new workers. At the same time as a the rise in public sector jobs, claims for unemployment benefits fell, raising high hopes that recent labor market woes are over and a new year may mark a new era in employment optimism.

According to a report from Reuters, the surge cam as a shock to those following the job marker trends, which to date had been less than stellar. “The ADP National Employment Report’s December job tally surprised economists who had expected a 178,000 gain.…

Amid encouraging job figures that the private sector is surging, it’s important to take a second look at the sad state of the so-called “American Dream.”

In a new article, the New York Times does just that, finding that “Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe. The mobility gap has been widely discussed in academic circles, but a sour season of mass unemployment and street protests has moved the discussion toward center stage.”

A major reason for this upward mobility issue is rooted deep into the results of the recent Recession: more people, are more poor than they’ve ever been, meaning younger generations, including our nation’s children, have farther to climb to get out of poverty.…

A couple of months ago we reported that North Carolina one of ten states with the largest employment gaps. That meant that as of this summer, the state of North Carolina would have needed to generate nearly 500,00 additional jobs in order to keep up with growing population numbers and old and new workers flooding the Tar Heel market in future months and years.

With these disturbing jobless figures in mind, it should therefore come as double-dose of economic reality that the Tar Heel State now also ranks among another not-so-distinguished list: One of the 10 states where the most unemployed could lose benefits.…

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.…

Threats of a double-dip recession — a recession, followed by a short-lived recovery, followed by another recession — permeated the headlines in 2011, at a time when there were plenty of signs that this second coming of an economic downturn had begun. Stagnate hiring, a paltry job market and plummeting real estate prices, as well as low consumer confidence, all made another financial reckoning feel less like a fiction and more like a reality.

But did this double-dip economic climate put the freeze on one of the country’s most popular purveyors of subzero sweets?

Such seems to be the case with the recent bankruptcy of Dippin’ Dots.…

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.…

Or, at least that’s what older workers believe.

According to a new survey from AARP, older workers say economy worse than last year. Nearly two thirds of workers in the 50+ age group first surveyed by AARP’s Public Policy Institute in 2010 said things had gotten worse by the time the senior lobbying powerhouse followed up in August. Fewer than one in 10 said their view of the economy had improved. The remainder felt like things were close to the same.

According to The Huffington Post’s Arthur Delaney, “Of the more than 5,000 people surveyed last year, 16.7 percent said they were jobless.…

Solid sales figures in prior pre-holiday shopping seasons combined with large crowds during the biggest shopping day of the year (AKA November’s “Black Friday”) had previously emboldened many eager employers to hire more seasonal staff leading up to an even busier holiday season. For example, the result of strong consumer demand in 2010—only one year out from the official end of the economic recession—was that hundreds of thousands of Americans were being hired for temporary jobs at retailers across the country—employment many hoped would eventually translate into full-time work.

But fast forward to fall 2011, as many retailers begin testing the waters for another tepid month of consumer confidence by announcing less-than-cheery holiday hiring.…

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 one of a two-part series exploring the TOP TEN tips for making a 2011 bankruptcy work for you:

(1) Talking Through Your Bankruptcy Tale.…

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.…

As we officially fling ourselves into a new financial outlook for fall, it’s worth remembering that the nation just exited the economic equivalent of “the summer of our discontent,” during which financial concerns seemed to prompt unprecedented dissatisfaction with the federal government. In fact, a mid-August poll from the Pew Research Center showed that public satisfaction with the federal government dropped to 11%–the lowest percentage since 1997. In reality, the number of Americans upset with government doings (or lack thereof) has doubled since March 2011 (26% of Americans say they’re angry at the federal government, up from 14 percent in March and 12 percent in 1997), signifying that our collective frustration over financial concerns is only getting more palpable as time progresses.…

After suffering through years of an economic downturn driven by a mortgage crisis, rising consumer debts, and mounting health care costs, of late many average Americans are increasingly hungry for the country to rebound financially. Unfortunately, at the same time, a confluence of events is prompting a resurgence of literal hunger in the U.S. as well as many other corners of the world-at-large.

According to the United States Department of Agriculture, for the third straight year, Hunger Action Month has had to contend with a 1 in 6 hunger rate, the highest percentage since the federal agency began monitoring national hunger in 1995.…

The nation’s income dropped in August 2011, for the first time in nearly two years, according to a government report released last week. The drop was precipitated by a weak labor market and falling consumer confidence.

According to Reuters, “Weak incomes as employment growth ground to a halt and earnings fell hurt spending in August. Income slipped 0.1 percent, the first decline since October 2009, with private wages and salaries dropping $12.2 billion. Economists had expected income to edge up 0.1 percent. Consumer spending growth slowed sharply to a 0.7 percent annual pace in the second quarter after advancing 2.1 percent in the first three months of the year.…

Poverty is now a common (and growing) problem for America’s single moms as jobs, and social safety nets fade as quickly as the economy tanked, according to a new article from The Huffington Post.

“In 2010, the first full calendar year after the Great Recession, nearly 41 percent of the nation’s single mothers with children under age 18, like Williams, lived on incomes below the federal poverty line. (Federal poverty measures differ according to family size.) New data released by the Census Bureau on Tuesday shows that few Americans fared well in 2010. About 46 million remained in or fell into poverty.…

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.…

Last week, Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America said it would cut about=a35,000 jobs and reduce annual expenses by $5 billion, as it struggles with costs from its 2008 takeover of Countrywide Financial Corp and a nearly 50 percent drop in share price this year.

The layoffs could have huge ripple effects for the North Carolina economy.

Already dealing with double-digit unemployment in July 2011 (10.1 percent) due to over 100,000 state government layoffs, the state’s impending loss of additional jobs for thousands in the languishing local private financial industry could mean the slow-to-recover North Carolina economy could get much worse before it gets better.…

Remember when Labor Day used to mark the last three-day weekend for waning summer fun and frivolity?

Well fast forward to September 2011 when Labor Day weekend arrives on the heels of disheartening fiscal news that the American economy added no jobs during the month of August (you read that correctly: none, zero, zilch), signifying to financial commentators and economic experts alike that the slow and steady economic recovery appears to be furiously losing steam.

Add to these facts that consumer confidence recently dropped almost 15 points to the lowest level since April 2009, and you might gather that these combined economic impacts would affect the way that average people plan to spend one of season’s best (and brightest) holiday weekends.…

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.…