Bankruptcy filings on the rise--AGAIN

The American Bankruptcy Institute (ABI) reported that January 2010 personal bankruptcy cases filed have increased by 15% over January of 2009. The number of cases filed in January 2010 was 102,254. Interestingly that was a decrease from the month before. However, as a practioner I recognize that December is always a slow month for bankrupcy filings and therefore that number is practically meaningless if we are just comparing December - January in sequence. The salient issue is that filings are definitely up and it is projected that consumer filings will exceed the 1.4 MILLION filings there were in 2009.