Here's one:
MYTH THREE: Bankruptcy provides an easy out.
This is the counsel of despair. Bankrutpcy is not as easy as it used to be, but the bottom line remains the same: if you jump over the (considerable) hurdles, you get to insulate post-bankruptcy wages from pre-bankruptcy claims. And my own guess is that Congress may very well come back to the drawing board after a year or two and roll back some of the more aggressive anti-debtor innovations.
And here's the other:
LAST MYTH: If we just taught people how to balance their checkbooks and read their credit-card agreement or their exotic mortgage, the problems would go away.
More despair. Granted, these guys do everything they can to conceal the truth from you. And you may not be able to nail down every penny. But you know the outlines: if you've got money 0n deposit at four percent while you pay 18 percent on your credit cards, then something is out of whack. Indeed, this is an error that goes back to the birth of the Consumer Credit Protection Act in 1969. That is: a fair number of borrowers do not know the terms of their deals. But a non-trivial cohort know in principle what is expensive and what is cheap, even if they can't do all the arithmetic.
[And BTW--99.99 percent of all computers come with a spreadsheet. Even if the borrower can't figure out how to use it, his lawyer certainly should--including, not least, the cadre of talented and disciplined consumer bankruptcy attorneys who play an important roles in keeping the bums honest.]
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