The truth is that money mystifies us.  We just don’t know what we really believe about money.  We can’t live with it, yet we can’t live without it.  We want more of it even though spending more of it won’t make us any happier.  The typical American spends 50 percent of his waking hours thinking […]

In the new world of unregulated lending, families are barraged with advertisements and offers for a new product:  all the debt they could ever want, and more.  Now, in a single year, more than five billion preapproved credit card offers — totaling over $350,000 of credit per family — pour into mailboxes all across America.
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Motherhood is now the single-best indicator that an unmarried middle-class woman will end up bankrupt.  In the world of financial devastation, there are two groups of people: single mothers and others.
— Elizabeth Warren & Amelia Warren Tyagi, The Two-Income Trap

There’s nothing new or exotic about the problems faced by American families today.  Jobs have come and gone, couples have broken up, and illnesses and injuries have been facts of life since the first caveman kissed the first cavewoman good-bye and headed off to the hunt.  But the Two-Income Trap compounded the ordinary risks of […]

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 […]

A family with children is now [2003] 75 percent more likely to be late on credit card payments than a family with no children.  The number of car repossessions has doubled in just five years.  Home foreclosures have more than tripled in less than 25 years, and families with children are now more likely than […]

Bankruptcy has become deeply entrenched in American life.  This year [2003], more people will end up bankrupt than will suffer a heart attack.  More adults will file for bankruptcy than will be diagnosed with cancer.  More people will file for bankruptcy than will graduate from college.  And, in an era when traditionalists decry the demise […]

Easy credit makes it easier to spend than to save, more pleasant to shop than to plan.  We throw money around.  We piss it away.  We treat ourselves to new shoes or a smart phone when we’re feeling blue.  The Wall Street Journal recently reported that since 1990, median household income has risen 11 percent, […]

According to research conducted in late 2002 by RoperASW, although 88 percent of Americans have enough money to make their rent or mortgage payments every month and nearly as many have enough money to buy the things they need, only 44 percent can afford to pay off their credit cards each month, and only 52 […]