RENTAL THEFT – A GROWING ISSUE IN CONSUMER BANKRUTPCY I recently have begun to notice a growing trend in consumer financing: leasing small personal property items such as beds, sofas, toys and other items normally financed as a sale. As the trend became more common, I began to wonder why such finance arrangements were suddenly […]

OLDER AMERICANS GREATLY INCREASING BANKRUPTCY FILINGS A recent New York Times article highlighted an area of concern in bankruptcy that our office has been seeing for many years – older individuals filing bankruptcy at a greatly increased rate: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/05/business/bankruptcy-older-americans.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FBankruptcies&action=click&contentCollection=timestopics&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection As in the article, our office has been seeing an increasing number of older bankruptcy filers. […]

TITLE PAWN AND BANKRUPTCY – NO REDEEMING QUALITIES When I first started practicing bankruptcy law over 20 years ago, title pawns were a fast growing, very lucrative business in Florida. Then in the year 2000, the Florida Legislature adopted a title loan statute to get the industry under some type of regulatory structure. Gone were […]

BANKRUPTCY PREDICTIONS FOR 2018: CONSUMER CREDIT NEARLY BACK TO PRE-RECESSION LEVELS Each year our office looks at the coming trends for consumer bankruptcy to figure out if bankruptcy filings are on the rise of will continue to fall. Based on my past research in this area, bankruptcy filings are tied closely to the level of […]