About 1.5 million households filed bankruptcy in the last year, making
bankruptcy as common as college graduation and divorce. The recession
has pushed more and more families into financial collapse--with
unemployment, declines in retirement wealth, and falling house values
destabilizing the American middle class. Broke explores the
consequences of this unprecedented growth in consumer debt and shows how
excessive borrowing undermines the prosperity of middle class America.
While the recession that began in mid-2007 has widened the scope of the
financial pain caused by overindebtedness, the problem predated that
large-scale economic meltdown. And by all indicators, consumer debt will
be a defining feature of middle-class families for years to come. The
staples of middle-class life--going to college, buying a house, starting
a small business--carry with them more financial risk than ever before,
requiring more borrowing and new riskier forms of borrowing. This book
reveals the people behind the statistics, looking closely at how people
get to the point of serious financial distress, the hardships of dealing
with overwhelming debt, and the difficulty of righting one's financial
life. In telling the stories of financial failures, this book exposes an
all-too-real part of middle-class life that is often lost in the success
stories that dominate the American economic narrative.
Authored by experts in several disciplines, including economics, law,
political science, psychology, and sociology, Broke presents analyses
from an original, proprietary data set of unprecedented scope and
detail, the 2007 Consumer Bankruptcy Project. Topics include class
status, home ownership, educational attainment, impacts of
self-employment, gender differences, economic security, and the
emotional costs of bankruptcy. The book makes judicious use of
illustrations to present key findings and concludes with a discussion of
the implications of the data for contemporary policy debates.
