• Many Americans have been under financial stress since the Great Recession began in 2008. Hundreds of billions of dollars of assets of middle class Americans have disappeared in the stock market crash and the ongoing multi-year decline in real estate values, and employment has been between nine and 10 percent for well over a year (and is not yet showing signs of real improvement). Furthermore, related to these family financial stresses, both state and local authorities are reporting soaring enrollment in social service programs like Food Stamps, Medicaid, and the like.
  
  

Unemployment

• Depending on whose numbers you believe, between 15 and 20 million Americans are unemployed as of October 2010, and according to a survey by the U.S. Dept of Labor, barely 49 percent of people laid off from 2007 through 2009 were reemployed by January 2010. Unemployment is a huge stress on a family as unemployment insurance payments only average around 70 percent of the prior earnings. Although Congress has extended unemployment benefits twice, the benefits of many millions of people have run out and they are living on savings or public assistance.
  
  

Mortgage Delinquency

• U.S. mortgage delinquencies hit an all-time high in early 2010 and continue to inch up. More than 7.4 million home loans are currently delinquent, which represents more than 10 percent of all mortgages held in the U.S. And the bad news is the trend has yet to reverse itself, and is not just limited to subprime loans. More and more families who took out reasonably conservative fixed-rate mortgages are for various reasons (primarily unemployment) finding that they do not have the income to make the payments. As of April 2010, 13.5 percent of American homeowners were either delinquent or in foreclosure.
  
  

Credit Card and Other Personal Debt

• Many thousands of Americans have gotten themselves in financial trouble with a greater credit card and other personal loan burden than they can handle. Most people assumed that their jobs were safe and did not worry much about their debt load. Now many people have either lost their jobs or are working in lower-paying jobs, which makes it very difficult to just keep up with the payments on these high-interest loans, never mind get ahead.