First, ask yourself if you feel lucky.
If you're reading this, you probably don't.
Bankruptcy is really sort of a pre-retirement planning exercise.
You can't very well start to save for retirement if you're paying 30% on your credit cards. And even if saving for retirement is out of the question, you can't retire if you have to keep making payments on credit card debt.
Putting it a different way, find a calculator and see how long it will take you to pay off your credit card debt. If you discover that you'll be two-hundred and seventy-three years old before you've paid off your credit card debt, there could be a bankruptcy in your future.
Or you can try this one: find an online retirement calculator. Decide when you want to retire. Figure out how much you need to save to retire. Decide how much you can obtain on your investments and how high inflation will run. Then work backward.
If you discover that you need to start saving at age 4 in order to retire when you would like to retire, there may be a Chapter 7 in your future.
If social security goes belly up, and jobs keep evaporating as they have recently, we'll see a lot more in the way of pre-retirement bankruptcy filings.
