Missouri Illinois Bankruptcy Attorney Foreclosure Reposession of Car

How We Can Help you

Bankruptcy Blog

Library

The Hard Lessons of 2008

The Castle Law Office is a St. Louis based bankruptcy firm that offers legal help for those who are suffering under severe debt. We help people in and around St. Louis successfully file for Chapter 7 and Chapter 13, and we do our best to see that the terms of their bankruptcy are as favorable as possible. This means that we help our clients successfully declare bankruptcy while still allowing them to keep their homes or other property. We also help them successfully cope with life after bankruptcy. Filing for bankruptcy should not be thought of as an end but rather a beginning. If you or a loved one in the St. Louis area is considering filing for bankruptcy, contact the Castle Law Office for a free legal consultation today.

While the election of Barack Obama was certainly a momentous event of 2008, it could be argued that the bigger story was the failing U.S. economy.

Not since the Great Depression has so much gone so wrong all at once. The housing boom collapsed with alarming rapidity, as the hundreds of thousands of people who chose adjustable rate mortgages suddenly found themselves with loans that were worth much more than the value of their houses.

Investment banks found their overall value scuttled as the billions that they invested in mortgage backed securities evaporated. One after another, Wall Street titans like Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch either went under or had to be purchased by competitors at practically rock bottom prices.

Credit markets froze, which meant a lot more than not being able to get a higher limit on your Visa. What that meant was that thousands of businesses didn’t have the money to pay their employees or keep their factories running. Layoffs and the overall jobless rate soared.

It seemed that not a day went by where the heads of one industry or another, from insurance to banking to automobiles, were sitting in front of Congress, hat in hand, asking for billions of dollars to keep their businesses afloat.

And as perhaps the biggest illustration of what went wrong with both our system and our culture, a well respected money manager named Bernard Madoff recently cost charities, businesses and the savings of regular investors billions of dollars when it was discovered that he was running nothing more than a decade long pyramid scheme.

The Federal Government, never a prime example of frugality to begin with, thought nothing of cutting taxes while dealing with the enormous costs of two wars. It seems that all over the country, there wasn’t one solid example of responsible money management.

It seems that for the past twenty years, our entire financial culture has flown in the face of all that is reasonable, and now the cold hard facts of economics have brought us back down to earth. To put it bluntly, the “Invisible Hand of Adam Smith” has smacked pretty much everyone dead in the mouth.

We have thought nothing of running up credit card debt, buying houses that we couldn’t afford, purchasing enormous gas guzzling vehicles and moving out into the suburbs. Television shows and magazines all seemed to be centered around what people owned, and what they were missing if they didn’t own enough. “Keeping up with the Neighbors” became the national ethos.

So now what? What’s the next step? How do we get out of this? How do we get back to normal?

A good first step would be to redefine what “normal” is. Getting back to the way of life where we think nothing of running up enormous credit card debt and engage in reckless spending won’t represent progress at all.

Instead, it would be in everyone’s best interest to start thinking only in terms of the money that they have rather than the money that they think will be there. As bankruptcy attorneys in St. Louis, a great many of our clients have found themselves in bad financial situations by overextending themselves, or being forced due to emergencies or accidents into spending money that they don’t have.

Apparently, the entire country was living the same way.

Filing for bankruptcy is a way for you to either get your debts under control through Chapter 13, or a way for you to start over completely through Chapter 7. If you live in or around St. Louis, either in Missouri or Illinois, the Castle Law Office can help.

Contact us for a free legal and financial consultation today.

Got A Question?

News

FAQs

Videos