The point is that families today are spending their money no more foolishly than their parents did. And yet they're five times more likely to go bankrupt, and three times more likely to lose their homes. Families are going broke on the basics - housing, health insurance, and education. These are the kind of bills that you can't just trim around the edges in the event of a downturn.
More and more families today are sending both parents into the workforce - t's become the norm, it's what we now expect. The overwhelming majority of us do it because we think it will make our families more secure. But that's not how things have worked out.
We all know that housing prices are going up, but what most people don't realize is that this has become a family problem. Housing prices are rising twice as fast for families with kids.
The fact is, out of all the possible reasons for going bankrupt, only three account for nearly 90 percent of bankruptcy: a job loss, a medical problem, or a divorce. And the fact is that those are exactly the kind of calamities that the bankruptcy courts were designed to help people through.
With both parents in the workforce 100 percent of the time, there's just no way to care for somebody on the side - either somebody has to take time off work or somebody has to pay someone to provide that care. In either it represents a big financial blow, and families just don't have the flexibility to deal with it.
If a parent wants to choose where their kid goes to school, they can either fork over a whole bunch of money in tuition for private school or they can buy a new house near the school of their choice. And it's driving up property prices in certain key areas. When you stop and think about it, that's kind of ridiculous.
Half of all people who go bankrupt cite a medical problem as one of the things that drove them into bankruptcy.
I don't see that as being good for America - that the country pits parents against everybody else.
