The North Carolina Bankruptcy Information Blog

Amid the lingering housing crisis, full of fraudulent foreclosures, falling home prices, missed mortgage modifications, and underwater homes drowning in delinquencies, many disenfranchised Americans have turned to renting to keep a roof over their heads, and their heads above financial water.

But new numbers from the Census Bureau and Morgan Stanley reveal that home ownership rates have fallen even more dramatically than previously thought, with average Americans avoiding the real estate reckoning through a variety of rental safety nets.

While, the official home ownership rate is around 66 percent, if you take out the widening number of mortgage delinquencies, this figure is actually 59.7 percent.…

After years of being mired in an economic malaise driven by the foreclosure mess, rising consumer debts, and mounting medical costs, you’d think it would finally be about time for a good old financial reprieve for American families.

Unfortunately, new figures reveal the real financial challenges—even post-recession—that are currently jeopardizing a U.S. family’s most basic needs and forcing many to make a decision between food and shelter.

According to a recent report, approximately 10 million American households— representing one in every four families that rent their homes—could have to choose between paying rent, buying groceries or staying current with bills. As The Huffington Post reported, “The number of households spending more than 50 percent of their income on rent and bills jumped by 2.6 million over the last decade, according to a Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies report.…

In what can be considered the best example of the current state of the nation’s commercial real estate industry, the largest residential real estate investment in United States history is facing bankruptcy. As a result, the current owners of the Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village are handing the property over to its primary financial backers after the recession and overall plunge in global real estate values decimated the complex’s value to a third of where it was upon its 2006 purchase.

Bought for $5.4 billion by Tishman Speyer and BlackRock Realty, the largely middle-class development in New York city housed 11,227 apartments and provided homes to close to 25,000 individuals, a population larger than many small cities.…

So the impact of your bankruptcy is settling in. You have mixed emotions but underneath, feel confident that it was the right thing to do. The phone has stopped ringing, the mailbox delivers good news (for the most part) and best of all, you can sleep again.

Now that it’s time to get back on track, saving money should be a top priority. And one way to do that is by examining what it takes for you to keep a roof over your head every month, even if you managed to avoid foreclosure. Today, thanks to the real estate crisis which saw developers nationwide building new home homes and apartment communities on every plot of improvable land, it is a buyer’s market.…