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More people are having serious money problems in Utah. Two different statistics that tell the story have gone way up.
Foreclosure filings jumped 141 percent in June compared to the same month last year. That's one in about every 660 households in Utah.
Wells Fargo Chief Economist Dr. Kelly Matthews says it looks like Utah is catching up to other areas of the nation.
"It would appear that the most recent data is a step toward perhaps looking a little bit more like Phoenix or Vegas or Southern California. I hope that's not the case, but we'll have to watch and see if this is a marking of a new worsening trend," he said.
Matthews says prices went up so far so fast that incomes just couldn't handle it. The Provo-Orem area is the worst, with an 810 percent increase in foreclosure filings from June 2007 to June 2008.
It's not only foreclosures that are rising. Bankruptcies are soaring, also.
More than 4,200 Utahns threw up the financial white flag in the first half of this year. That's up 42 percent from the first six months of last year and significantly higher than the national increase of 30 percent.
Experts say it can take a long time to recover from a bankruptcy: 12 years to catch the average solvent person in terms of savings, and as many as 26 years to match net worth.
E-mail: aadams@ksl.com
E-mail: mrichards@ksl.com
