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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…

Social media was supposed to be fun, but it turned very dark very quickly. People have been sending online messages to ruin each other’s days since the days of AIM and Friendster. If that scene in The Social Network has verisimilitude, idle smack talk was Facebook’s original purpose. (Most viewers were less surprised by the mean-spirited origins…

Operating a small business is not easy. When you hear people tell their business success stories, a part of the story usually goes, “After X years, our business became profitable.” This means that, for the first few years that the company was conducting business, it was operating at a loss. If the idea of paying…

If you start plugging numbers into bankruptcy protection calculators online, you might end up with an overly optimistic view of how a bankruptcy filing will affect your finances. You might think, “Really? I can get rid of $100,000 of debt for $800 and keep my house and car? Sign me up now!” Of course, you…

Filing for bankruptcy does not mean that you will never be able to access credit again. It also does not mean that, after discharging your old credit card debts in bankruptcy court, you can immediately open up a new account with the same credit limit and start making purchases like you used to do in…

If you follow the procedures correctly and answer all of the court’s questions truthfully, your chances of discharging your eligible debts in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing are high. Depending on your overall financial situation, it might even be able to discharge your eligible debts without liquidating any of your assets. Filing for Chapter 7…

Plenty of celebrities have spoken in interviews about the moment in which they first realized that they were wealthy, but Pete Townshend of the band The Who had an inkling that the world operates differently for wealthy people when he was still a struggling student. It was 1966, and Townshend had recently met Kit Lambert,…

Being in debt fills your mind with worries, but the consequences of falling behind on your death are more like death by a thousand cuts than a single, dramatic catastrophe. Disasters like getting evicted from your apartment or losing your house or car because you defaulted on the mortgage or auto loan take months before…

Even though you put a large portion of your income toward debt repayment each month, your debt balances keep getting bigger. Every time you pay off a BNPL purchase, three others appear in its place because you have no other way to pay for necessary items. Is it really worthwhile to pay the minimum payment…

It is easy to remember this during the mild, sunny winters and less easy to keep it in mind during the droughts and wildfires of summer, but we have it better here in California than people do in most other states, and not just because In-N-Out Burger is never far away. California’s minimum wage is…

What will you do when, after what seems like forever, your divorce becomes final? Will you burn your wedding photos? Will you go on Facebook and message your former in-laws to tell them how you really feel about them, or better yet, message the one that got away? Will you reinvent yourself with a new…