My task each week on SOAPnet's Bank of Mom and Dad is to provide young women with solid advice that will improve their messy financial lives. In return I've received quite the education on some of the reasons we, as a society and particularly women, overspend and compile debt.

Some new numbers have come out that serve as a reminder that the country is in a recession, regardless of what economists say. Last month, personal bankruptcies increased by 9 percent,according to the American Bankruptcy Institute.

That translates into 135,914 people who last month decided that their lives would be better off post-bankruptcy, than continuing to slog on and sink into a morass of financial despair. Hopefully, the fresh start will help, though you can just imagine that plenty of those people are still unemployed, and while now debt-free, or relatively debt free, aren't yet bringing in a serious income to fund their personal recoveries.

Goldman Sachs spent years buying hundreds of thousands of subprime mortgages during the real estate boom, packaging them into high-yield bonds. Now that the bottom has fallen out of the property market, the Wall Street behemoth finds itself in a different role: taking homes away from Americans defaulting on their loans.

That's according to a lengthy investigation by McClatchy Newspapers . The report says there are hundreds of cases in which subsidiaries of Goldman have sought to contain bondholder losses by foreclosing on properties and evicting delinquent borrowers.

A funny thing happens when checks stop rolling in. You don't have any money. That scenario is becoming reality for yet another Hollywood A-lister, Oscar winner, Nicolas Cage, whose movies have failed to produce box-office hits. Or a lot of royalty dough.

But Cage, who owes a reported $6.3 million to the IRS, isn't blaming his professional choices (or acting ability) for his cash crunch. Instead, he's suing his financial adviser, citing he's to blame for the actor's money woes.

On Oct. 16, Cage filed a lawsuit claiming his longtime business manager Samuel J. Levin "lined his [own} pockets with several million in business management fees while sending Cage down a path toward financial ruin." Cage claims he didn't realize he was in such a deep financial hole until earlier this year, when the sell-off began.

Small-business lender CIT Group Inc. has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the fifth-largest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history.

The beleaguered company, which had its roots in basic, no-frills loans to fast-food restaurants, clothing stores and the like, ran into trouble after a former Merrill Lynch executive took the helm in 2003 and pushed CIT into more exotic and risky investments that turned sour when the economy took a nosedive.

The part of the process that's most likely to upset average citizens is this: The terms of the bankruptcy filing wipe out CIT's obligation to pay back $2.3 billion it received from the government in December as part of the TARP program. The bailout was intended to get the company back on its feet, but things didn't go as planned and the lender was back roughly six months later, hat in hand again.

The Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 has hurt not just the everyday working person, but also those who harbored big dreams in real estate, only to see fortunes vanish as the bubble burst. In this Recession Diaries special, developer Paul Pierce, whose name has been changed, shares his story of boom-to-bust through exclusive WalletPop interviews and excerpts from the diary he began writing hours after the biggest deal of his career fell through -- leading to losses in excess of $40 million.

On Saturday, Nov. 1 -- All Saint's Day, as he knew from his Catholic upbringing -- Paul Pierce walked into a Philadelphia Rite Aid store, plunked down two bucks, and bought a notebook with a marbled red-and-white cardboard cover: the kind grade school students use to do homework.

Then he returned to his luxury home in the Society Hill neighborhood just a few blocks away, a double-lot house that developers like Pierce dream of building or buying for their families once they hit it big.

His stomach in a knot, he sat alone at the island in his spacious, modern urban kitchen, and scrawled:

The Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 has hurt not just the everyday working person, but also those who harbored big dreams in real estate only to see fortunes vanish as the bubble burst. In this Recession Diaries three-part special, developer Paul Pierce (whose name has been changed) shares his story of boom to bust through exclusive WalletPop interviews and excerpts from the diary he began writing hours after the biggest deal of his career fell through -- leading to losses in excess of $40 million.


On Saturday, Nov. 1, -- All Saint's Day, as he knew from his Catholic upbringing -- Paul Pierce walked into a Philadelphia Rite Aid store, plunked down two bucks and bought a notebook with a marbled red-and-white cardboard cover, the kind grade school students use to do homework.

Then he returned to his luxury home in the Society Hill neighborhood just a few blocks away, a double-lot house that developers like Pierce dream of building or buying for their families once they hit it big.

His stomach in a knot, he sat alone at the island in his spacious, modern urban kitchen, and started scrawling:

Of all the bills that arrive in the mail, one of the worst has to be a medical bill.

Whether from your insurance company or medical provider, the expensive bills are difficult to understand and patients don't know if they're getting ripped off.

Add in the fact that by a conservative definition, 62% of all bankruptcies in 2007 were because of medical bills, with 92% of those debtors incurring more than $5,000 in unpaid medical bills, and a hospital bill is enough to send you back to the hospital.

With an 80% success rate of getting patients' bills lowered, Medical Cost Advocate, or MCA, negotiates with medical providers to get lower bills. It's a service that makes everyone happy, said Derek Fitteron, CEO and founder of MCA. Patients pay less and doctors get paid.

It's hard to imagine a pleasant foreclosure. Like root canals or appendicitis, they don't really come with a silver lining; after all, it's hard to find a way to put a smiley face on being turned out of one's home. However, while there are few things that can make a foreclosure enjoyable, there are many factors that can make it considerably worse. Perhaps the worst of these is the notion that the bank, an entity that is ethically charged with making the foreclosure process as impersonal as possible, would allow its employees to reap a personal benefit from a customer's pain.

For Lawrence and Linda Elins, their forced relocation from their Malibu beach house was traumatic, as it came on the heels of a massive financial crisis. The Elins, who had invested much of their money with Bernard Madoff, were devastated by the December 2008 revelation that he was a fraud. In the ensuing months, they attempted to piece together the broken parts of their financial life, finally deciding in May 2009 to surrender the house that they had owned for 13 years.

Look, if I truly knew the answer to the question of how to monetize the newspaper mainstream media, I'd be drinking mai tais on the beach of my very own island in the South Pacific. That said, I do know enough to suggest some ways the MSM, at least, can slow the decline in profits.

1. Dump Print.
After staff, newsprint is the biggest cost factor for newspapers. But sure, I read a CNet story not long ago that said only 3 percent of newspaper reading was happening online. So a lot of people are still reading the print edition. How is it, then, that circulation is tanking? (Sure, customer service and delivery problems account for some of that, but not nearly all.)

The people reading papers are getting their information from a wide variety of sites. Some of which are online-only. Some of which, sure, steal from print sites. But if "newspaper" sites made their content available in varying formats that were optimized for reading on a desktop PC, a laptop, an iPhone and a Kindle, among others, that would make the online experience far more palatable.

Let's face it – the core newsprint audience is getting old. You can't rely on that audience to be around forever. And providing new ways for them to get their content is only going to make them happier, too. Mrs. Wizork is getting too stiff in the joints to wander down to the end of her driveway each morning, no matter the weather, to pick up a (possibly soggy) newspaper. It's getting harder for her to read the typeface. What if you gave her a Kindle or other e-book reader that converted the printed word into speech and she instead subscribed to an electronic version delivered to her reader in her nice warm (or cold, maybe she lives in Arizona) house each morning?

Print is dead. Everyone says it is. To hold onto reasons why it's not is to shortchange your readers.

2. Hire Ariana Huffington?
OK, few can afford to hire an independently wealthy Internet entrepreneur. But follow her lead.

Hire people who can write who are experts on what they're blogging about. Heck, some of 'em will do it for the exposure and minimal payment. Don't make your existing staff keep doing all the daily journalism they have to do for the core product and ALSO blog. Make some of them purely digital journalists. Their blogs are their beats. Don't try to do more with less, because you can't. Well, you can, but you can't do it well. You know it. And, more importantly, your readers know it. Use the people you have left in your newsrooms to cover what they cover well. If you simply still must have a print edition, have editors take their blogged content and make it fit whatever format you need for the dead tree edition.

Explore new revenue channels through blogging – find sponsors for blogs. If the blog's about music, get a venue to sponsor. If the blog's about that particular topic...do outreach, engage your community. Create an army of bloggers with the sanctioned trust of a major newspaper.

3. Allow users to design their own home page.
Every other news aggregator has been doing this since what seems like the dawn of the internet. Why can't you customize a newspaper website's layout?

To attract a more hardcore audience, you should use a Custom CRM for max web integration. Expand your reach and allow other newspapers to be imported (pass linkjuice onto them as well and they'll just do the same). Allow third parties such as Yelp to integrate their services. The more customized content you allow your customers to have access to, the more eyeballs will get to see it. Also, make sure your articles are easily shareable and transferable back to you ... and allow people to tweet directly from your site.

Think of your home page like a Google homepage. Let users add RSS feeds to their favorite content around the web and choose their favorite comic strips that you purchase from syndication. Make users able to turn your homepage into their homepage, so they don't have to go anywhere else.

4. Do breaking news. Or do longform. Don't try to do both.
When you try to do longform, you get sidetracked by the breaking news of the day. When you do breaking news, you get sidetracked by trying to figure out what longform pieces you're gonna write about the event. Plus, there's always some hotshot reporter working on a major longform piece you just can't pull her off of, so instead of giving your all to the breaking news of the day, you put who you have on the story, rather than who you need.

Breaking news: Own it. Incorporate Twitter streams into the breaking coverage. Monitor the Tweets and comments and follow up on leads from them. Sure, not every day has a major breaking news story. But if you cover your area well, you'll find far more breaking news than you ever imagined.

Long-form: Do it right. Be the written version of NPR. Delve into your subjects. Cover angles no one else is. Be the site that people go to when they want to know the story behind the story.

You know, do journalism.

5. Stop Interrupting, Start Interacting.
Broadcast media is no longer the accepted form of communication between user and provider. People expect to learn, respond and react to news. You can no longer broadcast something and then ignore its repercussions...the FCC would crucify you for one thing, but more importantly? So would your readers.

Take the example of Colonel Tribune and actually meet, talk and hang out with your audience. Also, take the approach that your story isn't done once it has been published look at it as if it has just begun.

This by no means is a complete list and MSM has a long way to go. What would you suggest?

Are you struggling to make your house payment each month? Part of the housing bill passed by President Obama included a program called Making Home Affordable Modification. It's designed to allow your servicing provider a method to make adjustments to your mortgage so you can afford the house payment and prevent going into foreclosure.

Ryan Minick and Steve DeLon are The 2 Mortgage Guys. Subscribe to their newsletter or visit them at www.The2MortgageGuys.com.

Slate.com has a funny/sad story of a dilapidated zoo in Gaza. Marah, located near a refugee camp, is one of the only amusement centers for local families who live with no respite from the clashes and clampdowns that turn their neighborhood into a war zone.

Although customers regularly admire the lone, sullen zebra from the other side of its cage bars, few of them have recognized its true lineage: It's actually a painted donkey.

Ritz Camera CEO David Ritz, along with a group of investors won the assets of his company at a bankruptcy auction. If approved by the court, they will retain ownership of the company and its 375 stores for just $33.1 million. And, they get to leave the company's $54 million debt behind though.

Ritz filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in February, but earlier this month it gave up on hatching a viable turnaround plan. Instead, it turned to liquidation. The chain was apparently a hot property. Bidding was reportedly fierce and went 43 rounds. Had Ritz not won, odds are good the stores would have been closed and sold for parts since liquidation firms were among the bidders.

When we reported on the likely prospect (which has since become reality) of California handing out IOUs while lawmakers tussled over how to close the state's budget gap, we didn't think "work now, get paid later" was going to become a common way for states to handle short-term cash crunches.

Looks like we were wrong. We're sad to say another state has resorted to making state workers pay the price for its inability to produce a workable budget.

According to CNNMoney.com, Pennsylvania has frozen the pay of its state workers as of July 1. This means that the paycheck employees got on July 17 only includes the hours they worked in June, while the paycheck they would ordinarily receive on July 31 will be replaced with a big, fat goose egg. Worse yet, whenever they are reimbursed, the state's not even going to throw in any interest for their trouble. (California is at least throwing its creditors a bone with 3.75% interest).

The recession has officially touched paradise with the news that an iconic Hawaiian resort is shutting its doors. The distinctive, Y-shaped Ilikai, made famous in the 1970s thanks to its role in the opening sequence of Hawaii Five-0, has closed after a long period of financial trouble. The privately-owned condominium portion of the property is not being affected by the hotel shutdown.

The hotel had been purchased by a developer in 2006 with big plans to pour $60 million worth of renovations into the property and restore its status as a Waikiki icon. The Ilikai's current owner formerly held that developer's loan; when the developer defaulted, the lender picked up the hotel at a foreclosure auction back in May but wasn't able to pull the money-losing property back into the black. According to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, the owner plans to relocate guests currently at the resort as well as those with future reservations, to other properties.

While it's unfortunate, this situation might also make travelers think: Could this happen to me? Many hotels around the country right now are in default or bankruptcy; while most of those stay open (in fact, guests may never even be aware that the place is having trouble paying its bills), there is a slim chance that you could book -- or, worse yet, already be staying in -- a hotel that's closing its doors.

Walletpop asked Alexander Anolik, San Francisco-based travel attorney and author of Traveler's Rights: Your Legal Guide to Fair Treatment and Full Value to give some advice on what travelers should do if their getaway goes away.