The North Carolina Bankruptcy Information Blog

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’ve all seen them.

Envelopes full of checks and other offers filling our mailboxes these days touting 0% or 2.99% and other low-to-no interest balance transfers for your more costly credit cards. These seductive rates do come at a cost if you don’t know what to look out for.

So check out these five tips to avoid getting taken advantage of, when taking advantage of balance transfer offers, including:

#1 Inspect the Interest Rates
When playing the balance game, the best bets are obviously the lowest interest rates available.  These days if you have a pretty good credit score, you can normally find a 0% interest teaser rate that can greatly reduce the amount of interest you’re currently paying.…

You’ve probably seen the hordes of protesters converging on New York in recent weeks, hell bent on occupying the very place where income inequity arguably began: the home of America’s financial markets, Wall Street.

But a new poll shows these self-professed 99 percenters, boycotting the privileged elite at the highest 1% of the income range, aren’t the only ones deeply troubled by the high incidences of income inequity in this country.

According to a new poll conducted by The Hill, nearly three-quarters of the people say that income inequality is a problem for the United States. More than half (55%) surveyed described income inequality is a big problem, while another 19 percent said it was “somewhat of a problem.”

These findings correspond with new information from a Congressional Budget Office report which reveals that the very highest American earners have, as the Huffington Post put it, “been pulling away from the rest of the population for over 30 years.”

As HuffPost writes, “According to the CBO’s report, income for the top 1 percent of earners has grown massively since 1979 — shooting up 275 percent in that time — while incomes for those in the middle 60 percent grew by only 40 percent.…

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.…

With news this month that almost 40 percent of Americans belive unemployment is the biggest issue facing the country—a figure that leapt from 29 percent between August and September 2011—it’s clear that folks are beginning to believe that joblessness more than “the economy” as a whole is the nation’s most important problem as well as a primary concern for them as part of a larger pool of citizens just struggling to get by in post-recessionary America.

These Gallup polling numbers explain why the Obama Administration’s recent announcement, and submission to Congress, of the American Jobs Act—combining stimulus and tax cuts to spur job growth—is more important than ever to a nation struggling to find a solution to its rampant unemployment and underemployment problems.…

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 hardly news to most Americans that good jobs in the U.S. wounded economy are more than hard to come by. But with news that the job market is as tough as it’s been in three decades, is now having a substantial impact on America’s ability to bounce back.

According to a new report from Reuters, “U.S. consumer confidence was little changed in September amid concerns about income as a gauge of labor market conditions deteriorated to its worst since 1983, an independent survey showed on Tuesday. The Conference Board said its index of consumer attitudes ticked up to 45.4 from an upwardly revised 45.2 in August.…

…unions?

That’s right.

Forget federal stimulus or tax cuts for the wealthy or even a new, formal jobs plan. Because according to a new analysis of Census data from the Center for American Progress, a boost in incomes of the union members by just one-tenth, “would increase middle-class incomes by $1,479 per year — even for those who aren’t members.”

In fact, according to the study, the rise in income is higher than if the unemployment rate dropped by four percentage points—a scenario that would increase middle class incomes by only $772 per household.  The Center for American Progress also found that the total share of income going to the middle class is below average in the states with the lowest unionization rates.…

While men were the ones initially reeling from the recent recession, women are now the ones with more and more reason to worry.

According to an Institute for Women’s Research Policy report released Monday, even though unemployment levels have steadily decreased for men over the past year, very few women are able to return to work in 2011, resulting in a significantly higher percentage of female Americans who continue to have deep concerns about their financial futures. The Women’s Research Policy report surveyed 2,746 American adults 18 years and older from September to November 2010.

As the report put it, “”Women seem to have remained in the recession a year and a half after its end, and in the year since the survey was completed, women have failed to share the same gain afforded by the weak job recovery.”

According to The Huffington Post, the economic recession “has frequently been dubbed a “mancession” to refer to the fact that men were hit especially hard by the downfall.…

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.…

You might think when city officials need to cut personnel costs, they start by letting public employees go.  But according to a new article from The Huffington Post, “firing people isn’t the first thing they look to do: it’s the third.” Ranking the reduction methods, HuffPost evaluates the eight top ways that city officials are dealing with budgetary woes—according to the National League of Cities—including:

(8) Reduce Pension Benefits
A full 18% of cities facing increasingly thin budgets cut back on pension benefits to shore up spending costs in 2011.

(7) Revise Union Contracts
Another 18% trimmed union agreements as a way to cut salaries and reduce previously bargained-for benefits.…

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.…

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.…

When home prices plunged, the stock market crashed, and nationwide hiring froze, many desperate debtors were left destitute, depressed and feeling without hope—all at the height of our recent Great Recession. But fast forward to nearly three years since the recession officially ended, and today many of the most mentally hard-hit Americans are those facing long-term unemployment.

According to researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, about 9 percent of Americans were defined as clinically depressed in data released last year by the compared to an estimated 6.6 percent in data collected in 2001 and 2002. In the process, many of these depressed men and women have also seen their home foreclosed, vehicles repossessed, relationships fail, and addictive behaviors prevail.…

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.…