Much Worse Off
Today’s bankrupt families are deeper in debt than their counterparts just twenty years earlier, and their overall financial picture — assets and debts — is worse. In 1981, the median family filing for bankruptcy owed 80 percent of total annual income in credit card and other nonmortgage debts; by 2001, that figure had nearly doubled to 150 percent of annual income. Even the credit industry, which has the most to gain from prying a few more dollars out of bankrupt families, estimates that only about 10 percent of families who file for bankruptcy could actually afford to repay even a portion of their discharged debts.
— Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi, The Two-Income Trap
