Restarting via bankruptcy will be getting a lot tougher

[FoolAndHisMoney]

What a lot of people fail to miss I think is that sometimes you can get in situations, through no fault of your own, that no matter how many hours you work, or how many things you did without, you still could not pay off your debt.

When if you are late on one payment and your interest rates go to 30% (on all you credit cards) plus late fees, even someone with a stable financial history could get sucked in. Add to that a situation of a job loss or large medical bills or the like and you can get into places where you could work 16 hours a day,pay all you earn each month, and still owe more that you did 30 days ago.

Yes, the number of bankruptcies have double over the past 10 years. What is often not put with those statistics is that during the same period, credit card company profits have tripled.

The only reason bankruptcies doubled is because now double the people have credit cards. It's rediculas how they all keep saying bankruptcies are going up every year. Of course they are! If they calculated the bankruptcy statistics with a growing population in percentages of 100 then the bankruptcy rate hardly went up at all in the last 20 years. It's still (even last year) only between 1% to 2% of all credit card users. They make it sound like it's 25%.

[bkadv]

This thread is the voice for someone who will never understand those of us who filed bk only after so much heartache and misery there was no other way out. Our debt went back over the span of 14 years, raising two kids and a husband who had two open heart surgeries. Thank God for the ability to erase our debt, and my sympathies go out to those who waited too late to file under the old laws. Everyone should be granted those choices.