Warren is a law professor at Harvard. Subscribe to our mailing list . Respond to this article . Email the text of this article to yourself or to a friend . Get a print-friendly version of this article .
Every financial problem confronting every family is made worse by an overlay of consumer debt.
During the past decades, with a sharp rise since the mid-1980s, American families have increased their debt burdens, making themselves vulnerable to every other problem that may come their way. The same pattern is true for every problem, from the most catastrophic to the mildest. As more families carry more debt, the number of Americans ripe for financial implosion grows exponentially. Our data show that the amount of unsecured debt that carries into bankruptcy as a proportion of peoples' income has stayed about the same. In the studies we report, the proportion of ordinary consumer debt incurred on credit cards carried into bankruptcy rose substantially from 1981 through 1997.