Elders in Bankruptcy On the Rise
A recent article, ‘Too little too late’: bankruptcy booms among older Americans published in The Business Times opens with a sobering thought: “[f]or a rapidly growing share of older Americans, traditional ideas about life in retirement are being upended by a dismal reality: bankruptcy.” A new study featured in the article paints a foreboding picture for many elder Americans “‘[t]he rate of people 65 and older filing for bankruptcy is three times what it was in 1991, the study found, and the same group accounts for a far greater share of all filers.” What is causing this increase? According to the article, many factors, including changes in pension plans, health care out of pocket costs, declining incomes, to name a few. It notes as well that elder Americans may have more challenges in recovering from financial setbacks than others. The study is done by the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, which “is a long-running effort now led by Thorne; Lawless; Pamela Foohey, a law professor at Indiana University; and Katherine Porter, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine. The project — which is financed by their universities — collects and analyzes court records on a continuing basis and follows up with written questionnaires. … Their latest study —which was posted online Sunday and has been submitted to an academic journal for peer review — is based on a sample of personal bankruptcy cases and questionnaires completed by 895 filers ages 19 to 92.”
The paper by the study authors, Graying of U.S. Bankruptcy: Fallout from Life in a Risk Society has been placed on SSRN.
The abstract offers this
The social safety net for older Americans has been shrinking for the past couple decades. The risks associated with aging, reduced income, and increased healthcare costs, have been off-loaded onto older individuals. At the same time, older Americans are increasingly likely to file consumer bankruptcy, and their representation among those in bankruptcy has never been higher. Using data from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project, we find more than a two-fold increase in the rate at which older Americans (age 65 and over) file for bankruptcy and an almost five-fold increase in the percentage of older persons in the U.S. bankruptcy system. The magnitude of growth in older Americans in bankruptcy is so large that the broader trend of an aging U.S. population can explain only a small portion of the effect. In our data, older Americans report they are struggling with increased financial risks, namely inadequate income and unmanageable costs of healthcare, as they try to deal with reductions to their social safety net. As a result of these increased financial burdens, the median senior bankruptcy filer enters bankruptcy with negative wealth of $17,390 as compared to more than $250,000 for their non-bankrupt peers. For an increasing number of older Americans, their golden years are fraught with economic risks, the result of which is often bankruptcy.