DENVER—Bankruptcy filings for the first three months of the year rose 35 percent in Colorado compared with the same period last year, court officials said.
Businesses and consumers filed 4,264 bankruptcy cases in Colorado in the first quarter, according to data released Tuesday by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.
Ellen Welner, a consumer bankruptcy lawyer with George T. Carlson & Associates in Englewood, estimates that home owners and real estate investors who can’t afford their mortgages are behind more than 60 percent of the bankruptcy filings she is seeing.
The rest of her clients are seeking relief because of more traditional causes—job loss, divorce, excessive credit-card debts and high medical bills, she said.
Nationally, there were 245,695 bankruptcy filings in the first same period, up 26.9 percent over the same period in 2007.
“We expect filings to surge past 1 million cases (nationally) by year-end,” said Samuel Gerdano, executive director of the American Bankruptcy Institute.
Business bankruptcy filings rose 20.8 percent in Colorado during the first quarter, compared with 38.7 percent nationally.
The pace of Colorado filings is still below that of 2005, when consumers were preparing for a tightening of bankruptcy rules. More than 43,000 bankruptcy petitions were filed in bankruptcy court in Denver that year.
