No More Free Couch: Streaming, Stamps, and the Rising Price of Staying Home
The Postal Service just hiked stamps to 82 cents and offered Barbie stamps as consolation. Meanwhile, foreclosures are back and my bankruptcy calendar is filling up. These things are related.
I’m not making up the Barbie part. The Forever stamp went up four cents on Sunday, and the same weekend, the Postal Service rolled out commemorative Barbie stamps — presumably to soften the blow. The stamp, the most boring and dependable purchase in American life, now costs 41% more than it did in 2021. The consolation prize is a doll.
Nobody’s monthly budget collapses over four cents. That’s not the point. The point is what the stamp represents: the last stretch of ground where prices weren’t supposed to move much, and now they move anyway.
The cheap stuff isn’t cheap anymore
There’s a word going around for this — “funflation” — and the newest wrinkle is that it followed us home. For a few years, when concerts and ballgames and restaurants got expensive, the fallback was staying in. That was the deal: the world costs more, but the couch is free.
The couch is no longer free. New spending data shows consumers actually cut back on home entertainment this June compared to last year. Game consoles, which used to get cheaper over time, have stayed expensive — tariffs and the AI industry’s appetite for memory chips are propping up hardware prices. Netflix, Prime Video, Spotify, Paramount+, YouTube Premium — nearly every streaming service has raised prices. Home fitness subscriptions went up. And electricity, the thing that powers all of it, is expected to hit record prices this summer.
When people start economizing on the substitute for going out, that’s not a lifestyle story. That’s a household-budget story. And household budgets are my line of work.
What the filings are telling us
Bankruptcy and family law is the family business — mine is a second-generation practice, and I’ve been at it myself for nearly thirty years. So I’ll tell you what I’m seeing in my own office this year: more bankruptcy work, and — for the first time in a long while — foreclosures again. Foreclosure activity mostly went quiet during the pandemic years, between the moratoriums and the forbearance programs. That quiet is over.
The national numbers back up what I’m seeing locally. Bankruptcy filings were up about 12% in the first half of 2026 versus last year — the continuation of a climb that’s now run eight straight quarters. Foreclosure filings jumped sharply in the first quarter. And here’s the detail that matters most to me: Chapter 7 filings are growing faster than Chapter 13. In plain English, Chapter 13 is for people who still have income to reorganize around. Chapter 7 is for people who don’t. When the mix shifts toward Chapter 7, it means more households aren’t restructuring — they’re starting over.
None of this is 2009. Filings are still well below the post-financial-crisis peak, and I’m not here to sell you a catastrophe. I don’t sell catastrophes. But the direction is unmistakable, and it matches what walks through my door: people who didn’t do anything reckless. They just got squeezed from twelve directions at once — groceries, insurance, the car payment, the credit card interest, and yes, even the stamp.
What to actually do about it
Not a course of action from a stage. Just what nearly thirty years of watching this up close has taught me:
Know your real number. Download your last three months of statements and figure out what your life actually costs — not what you think it costs. Every rebuild I’ve ever seen starts there, and most financial denial ends there.
Build the floor before anything else. Cash reserves first, even modest ones. The difference between a rough patch and a bankruptcy filing is usually a few months of cushion. Boring, I know. Boring is the point.
If you’re slipping, get informed early — not late. The most expensive mistake I see isn’t filing for bankruptcy. It’s the eighteen months of damage people do before they talk to anyone: draining a protected retirement account to pay unprotected credit card debt, moving money around in ways that create legal problems, riding it out on hope. By the time many people sit down with an attorney, they’ve already made the situation harder than it needed to be. Information is cheap. Waiting is not.
Don’t take on new debt unless you absolutely have to. Not for the vacation, not to smooth over a bad month, and especially not for the shiny stuff — the new vehicle, the motorcycle, the boat, the timeshare, the toys. I have watched more rebuilds get strangled in the driveway than in the courtroom. Nobody drives into my office in a car that’s underwater and says it was worth it. Until your money problems are completely behind you — not mostly, completely — the answer to shiny is no. It’ll still be shiny later.
Own things that pay you instead of things that bill you. Look at the list of what got more expensive at home: gaming, streaming, fitness apps, electricity. Every one of them is a subscription or a meter — money leaving on a schedule. Inflation is brutal on people whose financial life is all outflows, and much kinder to people who own assets on the other side of it. You don’t fight rising prices by finding cheaper subscriptions. You fight them by slowly, boringly accumulating things that produce — index funds, dividend payers, a paid-off anything. Once the floor is built, every spare dollar should be buying assets, not renting entertainment. That’s not a hot tip. It’s the whole game.
Protect the fun that’s actually free. The article that got me thinking about all this ended on a bright note: reading is still cheap, and it’s making a comeback. I’ll co-sign that. A library card costs nothing. A used paperback costs less than that Barbie stamp will after the next rate hike.
The part nobody puts in the headlines
Here’s what nearly thirty years of this work — in a practice my family has run for two generations — has taught me that no filing statistic captures: bankruptcy is a chapter, not the ending. I’ve watched clients sit across my desk on the worst day of their financial lives — and then, five or ten years later, I’ve watched some of those same people buy homes, build businesses, retire comfortably. Not despite the filing. Often because the filing gave them a floor to rebuild on, and the rebuild taught them what the flush years never did.
So if the numbers in this post describe your house right now, hear the whole message. Yes, the squeeze is real. Yes, more people are ending up in my office. But the people who come in early, learn their numbers, and rebuild deliberately do not stay down. I’ve seen it too many times to call it luck.
You can’t control the price of a stamp or a kilowatt-hour. You can control whether you know your numbers, whether you have a floor under you, whether your dollars are buying assets or renting distractions, and how early you ask for help. That’s not a system for getting rich quick. It’s a system for not getting wiped out — and for rebuilding better if you already were.
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Where to find more:
The Reconstruction System books (all 11) are on Amazon: amazon.com/author/davidreinherz — this post pairs with Book 2, The Bankruptcy Reconstruction
The free Reconstruction Toolkit and everything else: TheReconstructionSystem.com
Questions or a situation you’re working through? Reply to this email — I read them. david@thereconstructionsystem.com