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Going Broke on $50,000: The Story of the Struggling American Middle Class. The $50,000 Median Household Budget. Posted by mybudget360 in Employment, baby boomers, banks, budget, debt, economy, frugal, government, income, investing, recession, retirment planning, savings, wealth preservation 3 Comment ..The recent recession is exposing how many American families have been treading on the edge. Problems were already in the system before the recession began but the downturn in the economy was the ultimate catalyst. Many families were using credit cards as a means of supplementing a decade of stagnant wages. The median household income for the entire country is $50,740. In addition we have 34,000,000 Americans now receiving some form of food stamps. They are not part of the middle class group. Yet when we dig deeper into the data, it is clear why so many Americans are going broke on $50,000 a year Norton's comment: And now you know why it is a struggle! And it is going to get worse so...

``Now in the corporate market, the shoe is just beginning to fall, and we're poised for a major correction that has been coming for at least a decade.'' U.S. corporate bankruptcies are accelerating as the economic slowdown compounds the end of easy credit.....Increased levels of distressed corporate debt signal that failures will accelerate, says Lynn LoPucki, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles law school who studies bankruptcies.The amount of distressed corporate bonds jumped to $206 billion April 11 from $4.4 billion in March 2007, according to a Merrill Lynch & Co. index of bonds yielding at least 10 percentage points more than Treasuries. The share of leveraged loans considered distressed was 16 percent at the end of March, the highest since 1997, says Standard & Poor's, based on loans trading below 80 percent of their face value. ``Money was so easy, companies that should have failed were kept alive,'' said Rick Cieri, a bankru...

Opps, this article was in 1987, Note parallels with 2008 THE COMING DEFAULTS IN JUNK BONDS A FORTUNE study (1987) finds that many of these high-yield, low-quality securities face big trouble. The victims could range from huge institutions to countless small investors. By Ford S. Worthy REPORTER ASSOCIATES Lorraine Carson, Christopher Knowlton, Terence Pare, Andrew Evan Serwer March 16, 1987 (FORTUNE Magazine) – LEVINE. Boesky. Siegel. Wall Street's gallery of rogues keeps growing, with every indication of more to come. But while the financial community waits nervously for the next insider trading scandal to break, another kind of shocker is brewing. Not as dramatic, perhaps -- no one is likely to be led off in handcuffs -- but with effects that ultimately could prove more far- reaching. The threat: an unprecedented level of defaults by the companies issuing junk bonds. The fallout might rain down even on people who have never heard of these risky high-yield securities. Hundreds of ...