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Life on the Faultline: the Dagwood Generation Suffers Economic Burnout

By Joseph McDaniel, Esq.

There are tectonic plates that interact badly, causing earthquakes.

And these days different generations are interacting in ways that cause bankruptcy.

An older demographic is starting to file bankruptcy in increasing numbers, because the pressure of trying to do the right thing is causing tectonic shifts in the psyches of grownups.

For instance, a sixty-year old woman (let's call her Mabel)  who is caring for her eighty-five year old mother, and holding down a full time job, is going to be sleep deprived.

When the Mabel's daughter Susie shows up on the front porch after the divorce, with her daughter's two little kids in tow, Mabel is going to be sleep-deprived and depressed.

When mom falls and breaks something important, and becomes bedridden, Mabel gets to move from sleep-deprived and depressed to sleep-deprived, depressed and despairing.

Because Mabel sees that tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow will not get any better. She's already figured out that social security will not rescue her.

Now, depression causes confusion, and confusion causes bad decisions.

So when Mabel is faced with a shortage of income because her hours have been cut in half, she is going to make a decision that will probably be based on trying to reduce the number of folks screaming at her.

Mortgage companies don't scream very much. Credit card companies do nothing but scream, from Mabel's perspective. And threaten and harass and browbeat.

Hey, everybody needs a job, right?

Although calling and browbeating the Mabels of the world does get my vote for "World's Worst Job".

But collectors love their kids, too. And there are Mabels among collectors, as well, although they hate their jobs so much that the prescriptions barely help.

When I read the funnies as a kid on Sunday Morning, "Blondie" was married to Dagwood, who built huge sandwiches.

And huge sandwiches are pretty funny!

Unless you're Mabel. Because she's the filling in the sandwich, trying to hold the generations together, and that's not as easy or as much fun as it sounds.

The other big mistake that Mabel makes is waiting too long to file her bankruptcy.

Because one of her primary values, in the midst of depression, antidepressants, and sleeping pills (to try to get some sleep after bedpan duty with mom) is just to get people to shut up when they're screaming at her.

Since lawsuits, to poor exhausted Mabel, are just more pieces of paper, she ignores those. Until the garnishments hit.

And in one last effort to make the noise stop, and to try to get some rest, she pulls her retirement funds out and spends them to pay the credit card debt, and to try to pay off the judgments, so the humiliation of the garnishments stop.

I talked to Mabel (not her real name, not her real facts) a week or two ago.

The good news is that in six months she'll qualify under the means test to file a Chapter 7 Bankruptcy, and then she'll get some peace; and she'll feel like she's rich when she can buy food and medicine.

The part of it that makes me sad is that I have to force her to do more work before I can fix her problems.

She has to take a look at all those debts and lawyers and mortgage companies that she's been studiously ignoring for the last two or three years, and list all her stuff as well as all her creditors (without exception).

And it makes me sad that I have to bully her into filling out all that information, but it makes me happy that she'll get a bankruptcy discharge and get on with her life.

Full post as published by Arizona Bankruptcy Attorney Blog on September 23, 2010 (boomark / email).