Oak Park Real Estate & Estate Planning Blog

During the recession, consumer bankruptcy rates rose dramatically across the United States. As a recent article from Crain’s Chicago Business makes clear, there were 822,590 bankruptcies nationwide in 2007, and that number grew to more than one million each year. To put that increase another way, the rate of personal bankruptcy in the country increased by more than 20% during the peak of the recession. But have all states in the U.S. recovered, returning to the pre-recession rates of bankruptcy? As the article clarifies, while the national number of bankruptcies has dropped once again to levels that are even lower than those reported in 2007, Illinois continues to have higher rates of consumer bankruptcy than many other states. What do the higher rates of personal bankruptcy in Illinois tell us? If you live in the Chicago area and have questions about filing for consumer bankruptcy, you should always discuss your case with an experienced bankruptcy attorney. Illino...

For the last several years, experts have noted a decline in consumer bankruptcy filings in both the United States and the U.K. In many respects, the drop in personal bankruptcy has signaled that many Americans have begun to recover from the recession and the real estate crash of the mid-2000s. However, according to a recent report from CNBC , the stabilized economies in America and England could lead the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Bank of England to increase interest rates, and a rise in interest rates could result in more consumer bankruptcies on both sides of the Atlantic. Interest Rates May Rise as Economies Recover According to the article, the number of American bankruptcy filings decreased by 12 percent between June of 2014 and June of 2015. As Herman Poon, the director in Fitch Ratings, explained, “further improvements in both jobless claims and unemployment helped precipitate the better-than-expected decline in consumer bankruptcy filings.” Poon even went so f...