The North Carolina Bankruptcy Information Blog

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.…

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.…

Jobs in the private sector may be on the way up—a complete change of pace from the post-Recessionary years—but optimism about the mortgage industry is still way down in the wake of massive foreclosure abuses at major mortgage lenders.

In fact, The New York Times recently published a shocking article detailing the struggles of homeowners facing foreclosure framed by mortgage servicing horror stories piling up all across the nation.

According to the Times, dubious mortgage practices— widespread document execution fraud, misrepresenting fees, forgeries on signatures for your key mortgage documents, and making deceptive statements about efforts to correct paperwork—have become the norm, not the exception, for many a major mortgage lender from the West Coast to the East Coast.…

If you’re like many beleaguered and over-budgeted Americans, you grew weary and wary of credit card debt during the throes of the Great Recession.

The Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 (Credit CARD Act) was supposed to address the fact that you’ve been “paying” with plastic both literally and metaphorically ways for years, shielding average Americans from unexpected and massive changes to their credit card terms—terms that had previously led directly to financial hardship for an overwhelming amount of our nation’s families.

Fast Forward to 2011 when new legislation is actually worsening many of the gains from the Credit CARD Act, by tightening federal regulations on debit card usage and causing banks to push their credit card offers to supplement lost debit income.…

The fairer sex appears to be getting a less than fair shake at new jobs created in the wake of the economic downturn. In October, we reported that women have recovered just 9 percent of jobs lost, and men are recovering nearly three times faster. And things haven’t gotten much better.

As The Huffington Post reported this week, “On Friday the Labor Department announced that the unemployment rate among women fell to 7.8 percent in November from 8 percent the month before. The slight improvement belies the fact that the unemployment rate for women has been fairly stagnant since the recovery began in June 2009.…

In this blog we often talk about the benefits of bankruptcy for individuals and businesses—debtors who are part of the American fabric that are facing the significant financial perils of the current economic malaise.

But what if one of the financial entities that is often the primary culprit for harassing these same American debtors seeks the safe havens of bankruptcy relief? What are the economic impacts of such a filing?

Well, we just might see, as one of the nation’s major mortgage insurers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection this month– a move that’s seen as a blow to lenders overall and ultimately to borrowers who seek credit, including those in dire need of home loans.…

We’ve talked a lot about the recent record-breaking Black Friday, but it was our nation’s President who instead promoted shopping on the second annual “Small Business Saturday,” a day (November 26) devoted to spurring growth and hiring in some of our country’s most hard-hit business sectors.

According to Reuters, “Promoting “Small Business Saturday”, the second annual event to help Main Street merchants in a tough U.S. economy, [President] Obama visited a local bookstore with Malia, 13, and Sasha, 10, in the diverse, upscale Du Pont Circle area of downtown Washington.

“This is Small Business Saturday so we’re out here supporting small businesses,” said Obama, standing next to Malia who was hugging an armful of books to her chest.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

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.…

Some are calling a recent drop in consumer bankruptcies during the first half of 2011 a sure sign that the tides may finally be turning for the U.S. economy, as these new figures from the American Bankruptcy Institute Americans fuel the idea that American may be more financially stable in 2011 than they were at the same time last year.

According to the new data, consumer bankruptcy filings across the country totaled 709,303 during the first six months of 2011, a full eight percent less than the 770,117 filed during the same period in 2010. What’s more, using data provided by the National Bankruptcy Research Center, the ABI reported that there were 11,768 consumer bankruptcy petitions filed in June 2011, a five percent decrease from the number filed in June 2010.…

Three years back, Iceland’s entire financial system collapsed and despite being unable to bail itself out of its economic troubles on its own, the country is already recovering quickly and strongly.

As a result, there are valuable lessons anyone considering bankruptcy here at home (or even other countries) can learn from the this spate of Icelandic insolvency and what the Nordic nation ultimately did to solve it and emerge stronger than ever.

Iceland’s total financial collapse in 2008 culminated in all the banks and savings institutions — even insurance companies — going bankrupt in a day.

Neverthless, three years on, the President, Olafur Ragnar Grimmsen tells Marketplace that Iceland is doing better than ever.…

In this new “rough and tumble” economic era, 117,000 sounds like a lot.

$117,000 dollars. 117,000 shares of stock. 117,000 jobs?

Well, in all but one of those cases, you’d be right. In July, the American economy beat expectations by adding 117,000 new jobs to the current market and dropping the unemployment rate from 9.2 to 9.1%.

But what was truly great about this news of six-digit job growth was that it well eclipsed the paltry figures of positions added only one month earlier in June. Back then, economists had anticipated the June report would show about 120,000 private sector jobs added to the economy — barely enough to keep pace with population growth.…

It’s been two years since experts signaled the end of our recent Great Recession. But based on the most recent job report, it seems like only yesterday. In fact, according to last week’s surprisingly dismal government labor figures for June, a true recovery from the economic downturn of the late 2000s could be a long way off indeed.

A new article from The Huffington Post, in collaboration with Patch.com interprets the data, finding:

“Economists had anticipated the report would show about 120,000 private sector jobs added to the economy in June — barely enough to keep pace with population growth.…

Recent gains for marriage equality in states like Iowa and New Hampshire have been met by a lot of legal questions for those who are actually considering marriage with their gay and lesbian partner. Confusing differences in relationship recognition amongst state and federal laws can create true legal challenges for same-sex couples throughout the country. These legal hurdles for gay and lesbian spouses include barriers when these couples seek the benefits of bankruptcy. Because the federal government crafts bankruptcy legislation and bankruptcy law is decided on the federal level—and yet, bankruptcy law is regulated on the state level—differences can emerge in the way cases are handled, especially where same-sex couples are involved.…

If you’re like so many Americans experiencing tough economic times, you may feel completely overwhelmed by your current financial situation and unsure as to what options actually exist to alleviate it. Maybe you’ve been unable to modify your mortgage, hit with the costs of an unexpected medical situation, dealing with high interest credit cards or are navigating through the pitfalls of unemployment or underemployment with little understanding of how to pull yourself out of the subsequent a financial hole.

At times like these it’s often important to get “back to the basics,” separating fact from fiction in order to make an informed decision that can get you back on track for a better financial future.…