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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.…

How bad your finances are is, at least partially, a matter of perspective. Sure, you don’t have any money left at the end of the month to put into savings. If you are so optimistic that you transfer a percentage of your paycheck into savings every payday, then you end up transferring it back into…

After introductory quotes from texts in Latin, Classical Greek, and Italian, T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland” begins, “April is the cruellest month.” It is true that April is not especially cuddly, but all of the months are cruel these days. It is as if the financial death toll of the Christmas holidays never ends. Chances…

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…

You have heard all the conventional advice about improving your credit score. Take out a loan and repay it in installments. Pay your credit card balance down to zero every month. Of course, the way to do those things is to increase your earnings and decrease your expenses.  As it stands, you already spend every waking moment working,…

Welcome back to bankruptcy court. It has been a while. Then again, it has not been that long. Filing for bankruptcy protection can give you a much-needed reset and enable you to put the past behind you. For some people, that past is so painful that they spend the rest of their lives making every effort to…

The basic purpose of bankruptcy laws is to protect people from the horrible consequences of being unable to repay debts, consequences so horrible that they should not happen in a modern country with a functioning court system. In the old days, when people could not repay their debts, they went to debtors’ prisons or signed an…

Mortgage payments are expensive, which is why the process of qualifying for a mortgage loan is so expensive. With current interest rates as high as they are and with home prices so expensive, the only people who can afford to get a mortgage loan are the ones who are wealthy enough to place a large down…

You know you are rich if you have time to go to the gym or watch Netflix.  About 10 years ago, a guy wrote a blog post about how he lost a lot of weight by walking on the treadmill at the gym every day while watching movies on Netflix on his iPad, but these…

Living with a disability means managing all kinds of hassles and uncertainties. If you are having a good day or a good week, you try to be as productive as you can because you never know when your symptoms will get bad again, but at the same time, you do not want to push yourself so…

As the spring weather starts to feel like summer, you often see advertisements encouraging people to spend their tax refunds on new furniture, a vacation, or a down payment on a new car to add to the trade-in value of their old car. Your frenemies on social media, or the lifestyle influencers whose content you hate-watch,…

In an era characterized by the Great Resignation and where journalists have started to call young adults who have never had a paid job “the new unemployables,” people like you are an increasingly rare breed.  You have a salaried job and a retirement account, and you own your house.  You are in your 60s and…

You have been considering filing for bankruptcy for years, but things are starting to feel different now that you have set a date in your mind to file your petition for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. Like an unhappily married spouse counting down the days to Divorce Monday, or for that matter, like a fiancé who has…

It is easy enough to get in over your head with debt even when all parties involved are being honest and abiding by the law. When you look at the cost of rent, utilities, and healthcare, it is understandable to feel like big companies get away with fraud and extortion on a regular basis. For most Americans,…