July 2nd, 2009 by Reed Allmand 
According to an article in the Dallas Morning News, the country suffered 467,000 job losses in June, sending the unemployment rate soaring to 26-year high of 9.5 percent. And that’s not all, the average American worker who hasn’t succumb to a job loss has seen his/her workweek shrink to 33 hours, causing many workers to not only cut back on spending but to come perilously close to foreclosure and default on their other debts.
The article said:
“The worst crises in the housing, credit and financial markets since the 1930s have plunged the country into the longest recession since World War II. Many think the jobless rate could rise as high as 10.7 percent by the second quarter of next year before it starts to make a slow descent. Some think the rate will top out at 11 percent. The post-World War II high was 10.8 percent at the end of 1982, when the country had suffered through a severe recession.”
We have 14.7 million people unemployed in this country and the job losses continue to climb. If we counted the unemployed Americans who have settled for part-time work or giving up on their job search the real unemployment rate would be a startling 16.5 percent. Many of these unemployed workers have exhausted their benefits and many more simply never qualified for unemployment benefits. What’s happening to them? What’s happening is that many of these unemployed Americans are facing foreclosure, lawsuits from creditors and even homelessness as they fail to find work and fail to secure the financial assistance they need. And these aren’t your “average” homeless or indigent population. Many of these Americans are the victims of job losses and foreclosure. They are the people many would consider hardworking and responsible because they sacrificed everything to do the “right thing” and pay their debts regardless of the difficulties they were facing. I once read a story about an elderly woman who was facing foreclosure and eating cat food because she had become ensnared in a toxic mortgage and thought that bankruptcy was a shameful and bad thing, so she refused to file. This is a huge mistake. Many newly homeless Americans who have suffered job losses and foreclosures might have benefited from bankruptcy. The American bankruptcy system is designed to help debtors who can no longer pay their debts. Even huge corporations such as GM and Chrysler use bankruptcy to their benefit. Shouldn’t you? To find out how bankruptcy can help you deal with the blow of long-term unemployment and overwhelming debt, contact a Dallas-Fort Worth bankruptcy attorney today.
About Reed Allmand
Allmand's vision is rooted in his own financially precarious childhood in Abilene "My father always had difficulty holding a job and supporting our family, so after my parents divorced when I was 12, my sister and I got jobs to help make ends meet," he recalls. "I remember what it felt like as a child to worry that our car would be repossessed or home foreclosed on."
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