by Monica Chamness
Staff Writer
When it comes to trouble in the home, it is a good bet financial woes are a prime contributor, Dawn Lockhart told those attending the Jacksonville Bankruptcy Bar Association Thursday at the Radisson.
According to Lockhart, director of agency marketing for Consumer Credit Counseling Service, financial problems are the leading cause of divorce, substance abuse and domestic violence. She went on to reveal that Duval County has an astronomical divorce rate of 73 percent. CCCS provides financial and credit counseling, debt management, homeownership counseling and consumer education to First Coast residents.
“We’ve spent an inordinate amount of money and policy-making time working with families, trying to get them off welfare and onto the workfare movement, but we’ve really spent no time in our policy-making initiatives trying to incorporate economic education into our culture,” said Lockhart. “The school system is already overloaded with the things that they need to teach that parents aren’t teaching.”
Modifying an individual’s attitude towards personal money management is a key piece to the solution, she said.
Lockhart’s organization evaluates clients based on their income, debt, debt-to-income ratio and buying habits.
The average client is between 35 and 45, earns $35,000 a year and has amassed $18,000 worth of unsecured debt. Forty-five percent are homeowners.
“They usually have five or six Citibank accounts,” she said. “The people that we see are people we see on
TV — the public leaders in the community. We have bankruptcy attorneys come in our office; we’ve had City Council people — all walks of life.”
A plethora of dubious debt management companies, promising to erase bad credit, have sprung up as a result. Some lawmakers are attempting to correct the dilemma.
According to Lockhart, State Sen. Jim King has proposed a bill to prevent misrepresentations and regulate the trade.
Lockhart is in the process of creating a financial literacy coalition and has been working with the Duval County School Board to infuse financial literacy into required high school curriculums.
According to Bankruptcy Court Judge George Proctor, a new bill has been proposed which would require debtors to submit to credit counseling prior to filing for bankruptcy.