Oak Park Real Estate & Estate Planning Blog

If you are carrying a significant balance on your credit cards, you may not be alone with your debt struggles . But just because more Americans are carrying more credit card debt does not mean that living with revolving balances is a long-term solution to your financial problems. According to a recent article in Nerd Wallet , with rising interest rates, more people who carry substantial revolving balances may find their credit card bills even more difficult to manage. Since last year, revolving credit card balances across the country have risen by about 5% to $420.22 billion. For some of those debtors, filing for personal bankruptcy may be the best solution if paying off the credit card debt does not seem feasible. Average Credit Card Debt and Difficulty with Repayment According to the article, the average household in the U.S. carries a revolving credit balance of almost $7,000. Revolving balances refer to those balances that you do not pay off, but that you ca...

According to a recent report from Bloomberg BNA , bankruptcy filings have reached a 10-year low. With bankruptcy rates falling again during the month of September, the past year period represents a “10-year low for any 12-month period,” based on data from the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. In total, bankruptcy filings were down by about 1.8% this September in comparison with filings the previous year. There were a total of 790,830 bankruptcy filings as of this September, a number that is several thousand filings lower than the 805,580 figure from the end of September 2016. In general, bankruptcy filings have been at a general low since 2011, but were are continuing to see a decline. However, according to the article, the fact that we have reached a bankruptcy filing low suggests that we may again see an upturn in consumer bankruptcy filing rates, as well as business filings. Numbers are Low, but the Numbers are Still High Even though bankruptcy filing r...

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...