Broke
Subtitle: how debt bankrupts the middle class
By: edited by Katherine Porter
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Stanford, California
Language: eng
Number of pages: 320
ISBN-13: 9780804777001; 9780804777018
Copyright date: 2012
Subjects: Personal Finance; Debt; Consumer credit; Bankruptcy; Middle class
Description: From the publisher. 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{u2014}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{u2014}going to college, buying a house, starting a small business{u2014}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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Driven by debt : bankruptcy and financial failure in American families / Katherine Porter; title: A vulnerable middle class : bankruptcy and class status / Elizabeth Warren and Deborah Thorne; title: Out of balance? : financial distress in U.S. households / Brian Bucks; title: Home burdens : the high costs of homeownership / Jerry Anthony; title: College lessons : financial risks of dropping out / Katherine Porter; title: Striking out on their own : the self employed in bankruptcy / Robert Lawless; title: No forwarding address : losing homes in bankruptcy / Marianne Culhane; title: Women's work, women's worry : debt management in financially distressed families / Deborah Thorne; title: The do-it-yourself mirage : complexity in the bankruptcy system / Angela Littwin; title: Less forgiven : race and Chapter 13 bankruptcy / Dov Cohen and Robert Lawless; title: Borrowing to the brink : consumer debt in America / Kevin Leicht; title: The middle class at risk / Jacob Hacker.