If you’ve been out of your home in the past year or so, you know that the economy stinks. Every afternoon when I walk my dog I marvel at just how crowded the streets in my Brooklyn neighborhood are. It used to be filled with nannies and retirees (and the occasional homeless person wandering aimlessly) but now I see more parents with their children, a sign that (a) mom and/or dad no longer has a job; and (b) a child care employee no longer has a job. My wife’s “mommy message board” is filled with tales of woe – in fact, a good chunk of her friends and/or their spouses have been unemployed for awhile, with no end in sight.
Many of our friends and neighbors have been asking me whether they should file for bankruptcy. And though I don’t usually pay attention to grandiose statistics, I’ve seen a huge uptick in the number of people contacting me to set up a consultation about their bill problems. The bankruptcy courts are jammed now more than I’ve seen in a number of years – a sure sign that things are worse than ever.
My colleague Craig Robins, a bankruptcy lawyer in Long Island, recently posted that through October of this year, there have been 1.18 million personal bankruptcy filings in the United States. I didn’t need the statistic to tell me that there’s proverbial blood in the streets, but it does go to show that my Brooklyn neighborhood is not the only one experiencing tough economic times.
Chart courtesy of Calculated Risk.
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