More consumers resorted to bankruptcy last month, though this year is still on pace to come in with fewer bankruptcy filings than any year since the financial crisis erupted.
U.S. bankruptcy filings totaled 101,278 during all of October. Filings include personal and business bankruptcies.
The number jumped from September, when 87,522 bankruptcies were filed. In October of last year, 111,533 filings were registered.
Based on previous data reported by the American Bankruptcy Institute, 1,022,497 bankruptcy filings have been made during the first 10 months of 2012.
“Despite this uptick, total bankruptcy filings for the year remain on pace for about 1.2 million new cases, the lowest total since before the financial crisis in 2008,” ABI Executive Director Samuel J. Gerdano said in the report. “Sustained low interest rates and weak consumer spending by households de-leveraging are helping to restrain bankruptcy filing rates.”
ABI noted that it obtains that bankruptcy data from Epiq Systems Inc.
The non-commercial portion of last month’s bankruptcies was 96,498, worse than 83,493 filings in September. But non-commercial activity was lower than a year earlier, when 105,814 bankruptcies were filed.
Non-commercial year-to-date filings stood at 972,967 as of the end of October.
The per-capita rate from Jan. 1 through Oct. 31 was 3.96 filings per 1,000 in U.S. population.
Tennessee’s 7.05 filings per-capita rate was the worst of any state.
