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
Deleveraging American Homeowners?
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
Debate About Debt Collection Reform and Credit Availability
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
Recheck the Math on Reverse Mortgages
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
Net Impression” Outweighs what’s in your agreement: FTC/CFPB
What it means is exactly what you think. What you or your agents say to the clients on the phone will ultimately determine whether you are in violation of the law. Sales agents are notoriously savvy at blurring disclosures in their favor. Their primary goal is to enroll clients to
CFPB TAKES ACTION TO SHUT DOWN ILLEGAL STUDENT DEBT RELIEF SCHEME
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
Credit Repair Complaints -All Time Low
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.
CRA Seeks Exemptions of CROA H.R. 347
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
Indirect Auto Lending Enforcement Action – Equal Credit Opportunity Act
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
Disputing a Collection
If anything at all on the collection is inaccurate, make a note and demand that the information be updated, or otherwise the collection should be removed. Sometimes when creditors go back to look at collections, they can’t validate them, and then they’re required to remove them entirely. This fact also