A Judge that CARE's

With consumer debt rising and the national rate of savings decreasing a New York bankruptcy judge has become tired of seeing people burdened with credit card debt in his courtroom and has decided to do more than help them untangle their finances.

In Bankruptcy Court it is not unusual to see debtors with over 15 credit cards and credit card debt equal to one, two or even three times the amount of their annual income, and no assets to show for it.

Judge John Ninfo II founded Credit Abuse Resistance Education, or CARE. It sends volunteers from the bankruptcy system, judges, trustees and private attorneys, to talk to young people around the country about developing good money skills and avoiding debt traps.

CARE is among the 180 organizations that make up the JumpStart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy. Laura Levine, JumpStart's executive director, said CARE and other groups "do an amazing job, often with few resources," in trying to bring basic financial skills to the nation's youth.

She gives the coalition an A for effort, but acknowledges it has a way to go to deal with "a big problem that's not going to be solved overnight."

Financial education needs to be ingrained in our childrens heads from an early age with simple savings training in students as young as kindergarden age. When they learn to count and to use basic math skills, they need to be taught the importance of money and saving. We are sending these same children the wrong message by their parents spending habits.

Judge Ninfo uses real stories from his bankruptcy courtroom in Rochester, N.Y., to educate students about the potential dangers of misusing credit cards.

He tells of a couple who didn't even earn $50,000 a year but ran up more than $50,000 in credit card debt by taking repeated trips to Disney World "to keep the kids happy." And of an accountant who racked up $80,000 on her credit cards "keeping up with the Joneses and everybody else." And the man who accumulated $100,000 in card debt but wasn't worried because he intended to pay it off when he won a lottery.

Ninfo believes stories like these prove his point that the lack of financial literacy has moved beyond the problem stage to the crisis stage.

"We truly have a national epidemic of financial illiteracy in this country," Ninfo said in an interview. "We in the trenches of the bankruptcy system see it every day."

The idea behind the bankruptcy professionals' participation in CARE, he said, was "to be proactive to get the word out to people instead of being the ones who have to clean up the mess all of the time."

In a recent talk at the annual convention of the National Business Education Association in New York, Ninfo urged the teachers and school administrators in attendance to teach credit and debt education in their classrooms.

The fact that there has been a 96% increase in bankruptcy filings in the age group 25 years or less during the past 10 years demonstrates that there is a tremendous and immediate need to improve the financial literacy of students. I believe that providing students with credit abuse resistance education is the most valuable contribution that bankruptcy judges, court and clerk's office staff, and attorneys can offer to the parents and students in their communities.

The CARE Program's presentation is long PAST DUE! College students both want and need this information before they step on campus.

"Some of those kids don't pay down their school debts but continue to borrow - eventually ending up in bankruptcy court", Ninfo said.