The Two-Income Trap - Elizabeth Warren [101]
10 The proportion of mortgages in foreclosure proceedings at the end of the quarter increased from 0.31 percent in 1979 to 1.1 percent in 2002, an increase of 255 percent. Unpublished data, Foreclosure at End of Quarter, Mortgage Bankers of America (2002). For homeowners who were initially backed by FHA single-family mortgage insurance between 1982 and 2000, married couples with children were, on average, 39 percent more likely to undergo foreclosure by 2002 than married couples without children. Single parents were 28 percent more likely than single individuals without children. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), unpublished data, FHA Single-Family Mortgage Insurance Cumulative Number and Percent of Foreclosures, 1982-2002.
11 Michelle J. White, “Why It Pays to File for Bankruptcy: A Critical Look at the Incentives Under U.S. Personal Bankruptcy Law and a Proposal for Change,” University of Chicago Law Review 65 (Summer 1998), 685-732.
12 Among families in bankruptcy, 92 percent include a filer who completed at least some college (57 percent), held a job in the upper 80 percentile of occupational prestige (70 percent), and/or owned a home (58 percent). Two-thirds of filers met two or more criteria, and 27 percent met all three. Elizabeth Warren, “Financial Collapse and Class Status: Who Goes Bankrupt?” Osgood Hall Law Review 41, no. 1 (2003).
13 Our projection of the number of bankruptcies by single mothers between 2003 and 2010 is based on a linear regression of the number of women filing alone for bankruptcy in 1981 and 1991 and the number of single mothers filing in 2001. Chapter 5 has a further discussion of single mothers who file for bankruptcy.
14 Lillian P. Rubin, Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working-Class Family (New York: Basic Books, 1976). “Men manage the money in three-quarters of the [middle-class] families” (p. 107). Quoted in Deborah K. Thorne, “Personal Bankruptcy Through the Eyes of the Stigmatized: Insight into Issues of Shame, Gender, and Marital Discord,” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, May 2001.
15 Three-quarters of wives were exclusively responsible for assembling the necessary paperwork for credit counseling. Thorne, “Personal Bankruptcy Through the Eyes of the Stigmatized,” p. 190. Similarly, we found that among families in bankruptcy, wives were about twice as likely as husbands to be exclusively responsible for paying the bills and dealing with bill collectors. Thorne concludes that once families get into financial trouble, the burden of “debt management and bankruptcy is overwhelmingly shouldered by women; husbands sidestep and off-load the responsibilities” (p. 219).
16 W. Jean Yeung and Sandra L. Hofferth, “Family Adaptations to Income and Job Loss in the U.S.” Journal of Family and Economic Issues 19, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 255-283.
17 Foreclosure data, see HUD, unpublished data, 1982-2002. Custody was awarded to the wife in 72 percent of cases, compared with just 10 percent of awards going to the husband. The remainder were joint awards or awards to someone other than one of the spouses. Advance Report of Final Divorce Statistics 1989-1990. Available at http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/pubs/pubd/mvsr/supp/44-43/44-43.htm#43_9s [5/2/2003].
Chapter 2
1 John de Graaf, David Waan, and Thomas H. Naylor, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic (San Francisco: Barrett-Koehler, 2001), p. 13.
2 Graaf, Waan, and Naylor, Affluenza, p. 13.
3 Juliet B. Schor, The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting, and the New Consumer (New York: Basic Books, 1998), p. 20.
4 Robert H. Frank, Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess (New York: Free Press, 1999), p. 45.
5 Schor, The Overspent American, p. 21.
6 Graaf, Waan, and Naylor, Affluenza, back cover.
7 Schor, The Overspent American, p. 11.
8 The Bureau of Labor Statistics maintains the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CES), a periodic set of interviews and diary entries that