Latest Legal Insights for Bay Area Residents

In the game of personal finance, the grand prize is to own a house with a paid-off mortgage. Therefore, in the game of creditworthiness, a home mortgage is a grand prize. The easiest way to get a mortgage with a monthly payment that the lender is sure you can afford is to place a sizable…

You are not alone if you feel like artificial intelligence has made its presence felt in every aspect of your life. AI features in software guess what you meant to say instead when you mistype a word; often, they guess correctly, and sometimes they even autocorrect your error, which is especially annoying if yours is…

If you are old enough to qualify for a credit card, run up a big balance, and have so many other financial obligations that you can barely afford the minimum payments on your credit card, then you are old enough to know that there is no such thing as a free lunch. When people offer…

All over the country, but especially in California, people who used to enjoy a middle-class lifestyle are now complaining that their six-figure household income leaves them living paycheck to paycheck. They used to be able to transfer a percentage of every paycheck into savings and to afford leisure travel and restaurant meals. Now, they anxiously…

Young people have plenty of reasons to be in a bad mood about their finances. Buying a house is prohibitively expensive, but so is renting. Robots and chatbots are proving themselves to be increasingly competent at an increasing number of our jobs. Married people are better off financially than single people, and marriage rates are…

Losing money is a natural part of gambling, and if you are sure that there will be a chance to win the money back and then some, it can be part of the fun. If you have ever used the proceeds from gambling to pay your bills, you are not alone. So many people rely…

You have been trying for years to pay off your debts, and you are getting nowhere. It is only natural to feel demoralized. Even those lab rats that press the lever multiple times, but it gives them treats less and less often, eventually give up. Of course, you are not a lab rat, and you…

In a perfect world, no one would need to use credit cards, but a perfect world is so far away that you have already maxed out one credit card with grocery purchases and other expenses that no one would consider luxuries, and now you are running up the balance on at least one other card.…

When people meet with debt relief lawyers to discuss bankruptcy filings and other possible solutions to their debt problems, most of them tell a similar story of a debt problem that started gradually. Yes, there are people whose finances tanked suddenly after a personal disaster such as an injury or a divorce, but an even…

Economists seem to inhabit a world that bears little resemblance to the one where we toil incessantly in pursuit of our bread and butter. Our ordeal is just points on a graph to them, and from their bird’s eye view, it looks like the economy is doing great.  Economists rejoice that the unemployment rate is…