In Older Americans, Rising Debt May Adversely Affect Health​​​

With some older people finding themselves unable to dig out from debt, such dilemmas threaten any notion of a comfortable retirement and have generated alarm among economists and other researchers, the New York Times reported. “It’s like a dark cloud over your head,” Ms. Revel said. “You get people calling you, being demanding; some can be very rude. You don’t even want to answer your phone.” She worried constantly about her debts, including monthly installments on her 2014 Toyota Camry, and about being unable to access medical care if she needed it. Now, researchers at the Urban Institute, by analyzing broad national data over nearly 20 years, have reported that indebted older adults fare measurably worse on a range of health measures: fair or poor self-rated health, depression, inability to work, impaired ability to handle everyday activities like bathing and dressing. Those in debt were also more likely to have had two or more doctor-diagnosed illnesses like hypertension, diabetes, cancer, heart and lung disease, heart attacks and strokes. Older adults typically carry less debt than younger ones because people tend to shed debt as they approach and enter retirement. But in recent decades, each cohort of seniors has been more indebted than the previous one. “There’s a group of older people in financial distress,” said Annamaria Lusardi, an economist at the George Washington University. “They’re highly leveraged; they’re carrying high-cost debt. They’re being contacted by debt collectors.”

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IRS Warns Scammers Still Using Pandemic to Steal Americans’ Money, Identities​​​

The IRS warned Tuesday that potential scammers are still using various types of pandemic-related scams to steal money and identity from U.S. citizens, The Hill reported. The IRS in March said its investigators had uncovered more than $1.8 billion in fraudulent activity related to federal COVID-19 stimulus funds. And a tsunami of fraudulent unemployment claims have cost states and the federal government tens of billions of dollars. In a statement on Monday, IRS noted that scammers are sometimes using fake job offers and stimulus checks to gain access to victims’ information to file false unemployment claims or tax returns. “Scammers continue using the pandemic as a device to scare or confuse potential victims into handing over their hard-earned money or personal information,” IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig said in a statement. “I urge everyone to be leery of suspicious calls, texts and emails promising benefits that don’t exist.”

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Mass Tort Tidal Wave, Subchapter V, Student Loans and More to Be Discussed at ABI's 2022 Central States Bankruptcy Workshop June 23-25!​​​

ABI's 2022 Central States Bankruptcy Workshop returns June 23-25 to the Grand Geneva Resort & Spa in Lake Geneva, Wis., bringing a flexible workshop format for both consumer and business practitioners. The workshop’s repeating sessions allow attendees to customize their learning experience while earning up to 8.25/9.5 hours of CLE/CPE, including 2.75/3 hours of ethics. A special judicial roundtable session will feature 13 bankruptcy judges representing Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. For a full list of all the sessions, great networking events and to register, please click here.

Weekly U.S. Unemployment Claims Jump 27,000 to Five-Month High of 229,000​​​

New filings for unemployment benefits jumped by 27,000 last week to a five-month high of 229,000, but almost the entire increase appeared to stem from seasonal quirks tied to the Memorial Day holiday instead of rising layoffs, MarketWatch.com reported. Raw or actual jobless claims were little changed. They edged up to 184,604 from 183,596 in the prior week. Normally the government’s seasonal adjustments don’t produce such large discrepancies, but the Memorial Day holiday likely threw them off. Holidays can often generate sharp swings in the claims figures. The four-week average of new jobless claims, seasonally adjusted, rose a smaller 8,000 to 215,000. Florida, Georgia and Pennsylvania were the only states to post an increase of 1,000 or more in new unemployment filings, based on the unadjusted figures.

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IRS 'Under Siege', Yellen Says, Needs $80 Billion to Beef Up Tax Work​​​

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Tuesday urged Congress to approve $80 billion in funding for the Internal Revenue Service to help the agency reduce a huge backlog of tax returns and allow it to go after $600 billion in unpaid tax bills, Reuters reported. "The IRS is under siege. It is suffering from huge underinvestment," Yellen told a Senate Finance Committee hearing on Treasury's budget request for fiscal 2023. Yellen said that the agency was dealing with massive problems, including a "huge backlog" in working through tax returns, and lacked the personnel needed to carry out complicated audits of higher-earning taxpayers. As of May 27, the IRS had 10.2 million unprocessed individual returns, including 8.2 million paper returns waiting to be reviewed and processed, according to IRS.gov.

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Jump in Mortgage Rates Could Add $100,000 to Housing Costs​​​

The recent rise in U.S. mortgage rates could bump up the average mortgage payment by hundreds of dollars each month, potentially adding more than $100,000 in costs over the lifetime of a typical loan, a new study shows, the New York Times reported. The report, compiled by the online lending marketplace LendingTree, compared the average monthly payments on 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages across the nation in January, when the average rate was 3.79 percent, and April, when it hit 5.25 percent. It found that in states where housing prices were the highest, new borrowers could expect to see bigger increases in costs. In California, for instance, home buyers paid an extra $407 a month. The monthly increase was $357 in Washington and $337 in Massachusetts. These extra monthly costs add up to an average of $132,167 over a 30-year loan, according to the report. The study found that states with the lowest monthly increases were Ohio ($200), West Virginia ($201) and Kentucky ($202), totaling an average of $72,317 in extra costs over 30 years.

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