Los Angeles Bankruptcy Blog

In early 2008, I wrote a post about good financial habits you can get into in order to avoid visiting a bankruptcy law office. One of them was to save. Very few people I see save. Saving will help you weather the inevitable bad times in life. The opposite of saving — spend money — generally leads people and companies to bankruptcy faster. Spending helps your money leave you. Saving helps it stay with you. To spend money does not keep you from going bankrupt.

From someone who sees people in dire times day after day, I just needed to correct the record.

Pay yourself first.

Save!

Since I’m publishing links, here’s another from the Wall Street Journal re: the best consumer finance online tools.

Barrons makes the point that the worst is yet to come.

The company that owns retailer Babyphat is considering declaring bankruptcy. As you look around our bankruptcy blog, you’ll see that it’s not as bad as you think.

What’s the main reason people default on homes? ARMs? High interest rates?

Nope. It’s negative equity.

Citi is increasing rates on millions of credit card holders, just before laws preventing credit card interest rate increases come into effect.

Question: since the US Government owns 36 percent of Citi, and we are being forced to pay more money, and over one-third of that Citi money goes to the government, isn’t this really a stealth tax increase?