A couple of weeks ago, I shared with you a news item from Great Britain about the 6% of Brits who are literally using credit cards to make mortgage payments. Just last week, I caught an article in the Israeli daily newspaper Ma’ariv, telling about the housing problems in that country. The Israel Ministry of Housing reports that 1560 families have been evicted from their homes, with proceedings begun against an additional 15,000 families. The Ministry estimates that 80,000 Israeli homeowners are having difficulty keeping up with their mortgage payments.
As a bankruptcy attorney here in Indiana, I am always interested in articles that concern personal finance and debt issues. The part of the Israeli newspaper article that most resonated with me was a quote from a Dr. Ruth Plato-Shinar, who is head of the Netania College Banking Center. Dr. Plato-Shinar comments that when people were signing up for mortgages and calculating how much of a monthly payment they could handle, they did not take into account the effects of job loss, illness, or divorce.
Wow! This remark from an financial professional 6,000 miles across the globe describes “to a tee” the situations I see every working day in the different offices of my bankruptcy law practice here in Indiana. Good people, with every intention of paying their bills, have had their lives derailed by one or more of those three enemies of financial health: job loss, illness, and divorce. And apparently, it’s happening all over the world…