Research

As part of its National Consumer Assistance Plan (the result of a settlement brokered with 31 state attorneys general back in 2015), Equifax, Experian and TransUnion are planning to significantly reduce the amount of tax-lien and civil-judgment information found in consumer credit files. Details have yet to be finalized however testing is

The Department of Education announced earlier this month its plan to create a single Web portal for federal student loan borrowers – a move to make payments easier. Once the platform is released, borrowers will be redirected to a single portal to pay their student debt. But the site isn’t

The Federal Housing Finance Agency has finally announced a program to reduce principal balances of distressed home mortgages held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, eight years into the foreclosure crisis. Too little, too late would be an understatement to describe this initiative. According to the agency’s announcement, they expect

The Center for Responsible Lending has produced a nice, new empirical paper reflecting on and refuting the notion that certain debt collection reforms restrict the flow of consumer credit. The analysis is careful and impressive, and the natural laboratory experiment they found is fun and intriguing. In a nutshell, North

Tara Twomey is just a keen observer of the consumer finance world, and she recently alerted me to a trend. Reverse mortgages are being aggressively hawked as a valuable financial planning tool, and the media is picking up the story. Even the reverse mortgage industry rag is excited at its

Today the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) requested that a federal district court enter a final judgment and order that would shut down a student debt relief scheme that charged borrowers millions of dollars in illegal upfront fees for federal student loan services. If approved by the court, the proposed

The 2015 consumer Sentinel Report on consumer complaints was released today. The credit repair industry complaints is at an all time low. CCA is please with this report. Credit Repair last year only account for 0.06% of consumer complaints. We have provided a this information below.

National Consumer Law Center Opposes H.R. 347 Questions and Answers Regarding Opposition to H.R. 347 Recently, supporters of H.R. 347, the misleadingly-named “Facilitating Access to Credit Act of 2015,” have advanced a number of arguments as to why the nationwide credit reporting agencies should be exempt from coverage by the

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Department of Justice announced a $21.9 million settlement with Toyota Motor Credit Corp. to address indirect auto loan pricing policies with discriminatory effects. The fair lending enforcement order follows a three-year investigation by the CFPB and DOJ, which determined that thousands of African-American

A consumer can hardly hope to purchase a financial product or service without being subject to fine-print terms that require them to surrender their right to go to court and privately arbitrate any dispute that might come up between them and lenders or other financial institutions. But the CFPB’s proposal