Recent Blog Posts
What Should Victims of Financial Crime Do to Cope With the Resulting Debts?
It is easy to feel like everyone is blaming you for being in debt. Personal finance experts smugly tell you to earn more money and spend less, even though you already spend virtually every waking moment engaged in at least one income-generating activity; at this moment, a receptionist at an apartment building or hotel… Read More »
The Trouble With Earned Wage Access Apps
“Living paycheck to paycheck” is a euphemism. Most people who fit into that category do not have enough money to make it until payday. Furthermore, there is a sharp divide between the upper middle-class paycheck to paycheck set, on the one hand, and the rest of us, on the other. The former have credit… Read More »
Can Debt Relief Make Your Retirement Plans a Reality?
For as long as you can remember, your future plans have not extended beyond the next payday. You spend every pay period scrambling to make the next installment payment on your debts. If you are among the lucky few, you signed up years ago to have your employer deposit a small portion of each… Read More »
It Pays to Pay With Cash
If you wait long enough, all of your favorite old-fashioned habits come back in style. After decades of nothing but dark denim on store shelves, faded jeans are making their first appearance since a time so early in the 90s that no one in Florida had heard grunge rock. Now that the babies who… Read More »
Coping With Unexpected Financial Setbacks in Retirement
Perhaps you heard that, after much media hype, Florida abolished permanent alimony. Pursuant to the new law, all alimony awards have an automatic end date, and alimony obligations cannot last longer than the marriage did. Therefore, if you got married at 25 and divorced at 50, the court can only order you to pay… Read More »
Reverse Mortgages
Loneliness is an essential feature of the American experience and has been such at least since the days of the Beat Generation. One of the most obvious signs of this loneliness is that the only correspondence you get, whether in the form of email or postal mail, is from people who want to make… Read More »
New Regulations for Buy Now Pay Later
The best thing about buy now pay later (BNPL) is that it is so easy to make purchases on credit, and, in theory, they are interest free. The worst thing is that it is so easy to buy things that you cannot afford, and therefore to fall behind on payments. Optimists might say that… Read More »
Seniors and Mortgage Debt
For decades, Florida has been an attractive destination for retirees, but it has changed a lot since today’s old geezers were young. In the 1980s, tiny anole lizards scurried across the sidewalk everywhere you went, but iguanas were only in zoos, but today, the sight of enormous green lizards lounging in the trees or… Read More »
Here Come the Zero Down Payment Mortgages
The signs of financial catastrophe are all around us. Grocery prices have not decreased much since the worst days of the pandemic. Well-paying jobs are beyond anyone’s hopes. Today, you are lucky if you can get a low-paying job and supplement it with gigs; most of us have no choice but to cobble together… Read More »
Can You Discharge Student Loans in Bankruptcy?
The good news is that everyone has the right to discharge unpayable debts in bankruptcy, but the bad news is that not all debts are eligible for discharge. In general, it is easy to discharge debts that you owe to private lenders, such as credit card companies and hospitals, but if the creditor is… Read More »