RSS FeedTime Magazine, Newsweek, Businessweek, CNN – wherever I looked, it seemed, the name of one book kept appearing: The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke. As it turns out, the co-author of the book, Elizabeth Warren, is a bankruptcy law expert and a professor of law at Harvard Law School.
It’s hard to believe this book was written in 2003, before the severe economic recession we’ve just come through, and before the bankruptcy laws were changed. Had Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi been writing this book today, it could not have been any more realistic.
I’ve been offering bankruptcy services in Indiana for more than twenty years, and every single working day I and the Columbus bankruptcy lawyers who work in my office there see living confirmation of many of the statements in this book.
Writing in 2003, Warren points out, “This year, more people will end up in bankruptcy than will:
- suffer a heart attack
- be diagnosed with cancer
- go through a foreclosure on a home
- graduate from college
- file for divorce
“Who are the families in so much trouble?” Warren asks. Well, in the course of my long career offfering Indiana bankruptcy help, I’ve worked with tens of thousands of people, and Warren’s absolutely right about her answer to that question:
“…ordinary, middle class people united by their determination to provide a decent life for their children.”
What Warren calls “The Myth of the Immoral Debtor” is a view that large numbers of our fellow citizens exploit the bankruptcy system to avoid repaying their debts, expecting society to foot the bill for them. And, as Warren correctly says, “The data just don’t support that argument.”
In fact, Warren points out, “The average person who filed for bankruptcy reports spending more than a year struggling to pay debts.” 50% had their telephone service or utilities shut off before they filed. 60% did without needed medical care to save money, and some had gone without food!
These are precisely the situations I’m finding six years after the book was published. And that’s exactly the reason I so strongly urge people to seek legal help at the first signs of financial trouble.
You see, to me, the statistics I read in the book are not six-year old numbers – they’re the NOW.
And those people sitting in my waiting rooms – these are no deadbeats. They’re the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God neighbors and friends.
Can you see why I and all the professionals in the Mark Zuckerberg bankruptcy law offices have dedicated our efforts to help?
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Of course families spend their fixed expenditures mostly on trying to make a middle-class life with opportunities for their children. What is other greater reason for living!