More young people going bankrupt

Germany's robust economy has reduced the number of private bankruptcies in the first quarter of the year -but the number of young people going bankrupt has jumped by over a third, new statistics show.


According to the Hamburg-based economic research group Bürgel, 32,760 Germans filed for bankruptcy in the first three months of 2012 - 3.7 percent less than in the same period last year.

This downward trend is being attributed to sinking unemployment and good economic growth, but there is a worrying counter-development – younger and older people are going bankrupt at disproportionally high rates. 

The number of men over 60 filing for bankruptcy rose by 5.9 percent in the first quarter of this year compared to the first quarter of last year. This has been put down to dropping pension levels and the lower wages.

But the most dramatic figure came from the other end of the age scale - the number of bankruptcies among people aged between 18 and 25 increased by 35.6 percent to 2,980. 

The insolvency experts say that young people are often more vulnerable to bankruptcy as they have less experience of dealing with money, and are less likely to save. 

Germans have massively increased their borrowing in the past decade - with total amount of private debt climbing from just over €500 million in 1999 to well over €6.2 billion in 2010. The number of bankruptcy cases jumped from 3,357 to 108,798 in the same period.


Source:http://www.thelocal.de/national/20120608-43043.html