owever, recent trends raise alarming questions about the potential for scams and abuse, especially against older consumers and in communities already devastated by disinvestment, redlining, and unaffordable lending.
Read More about PACE Loans: State and Local Consumer Protection Recommendations
Quotes from the transcripts of August 2019 earnings calls by three publicly-traded payday lenders that offer high-cost installment loans in California at rates of 135% to 199% describing their plans to enter into rent-a-bank schemes to evade the new law.
Debt collection affects 71 million U.S. consumers, with 1 in 3 Americans with a credit report having a debt in collections. This number rises to a staggering 45% of Americans living in predominantly non-white zip codes.
Read More about What States Can Do to Help Consumers: Debt Collection
Consumers are “credit invisible” if they don’t have any credit history with the Big Three credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion) or if their histories are too scant or old (“thin”) to generate a credit score.
Read More about Credit Invisibility and Alternative Data: Promises and Perils
A bill pending in the U.S. House of Representatives, H.R. 1849: Practice of Law Technical Clarification Act of 2017 (Trott), would exempt attorneys and law firms engaged in litigation from the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) and eliminate Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) authority over them. Claiming that state courts and bar associations would…
Read More about U.S. House bill would allow lawyers to abuse consumers in debt collection lawsuits
NCLC has collected stories described to us by numerous consumer advocates or reported in the news media or online. The homeowner stories that were shared with us demonstrate disturbing patterns. We summarize those patterns with numerical references to the stories.
Read More about Residential PACE Loans: the Perils of Easy Money for Clean Energy Improvements
Conventional analysis of auto finance tends to ignore the number of families affected and their demographics. It also tends to obscure the rate at which new car financings are originated in comparison to other consumer debt. While economists, policymakers, and others realize the overall role that auto finance plays in the United States’ financial landscape, the scale of the impact of auto finance on those with low and moderate income, people of color, and younger people has received less attention. This report looks at existing data in new ways to better understand the true scale of auto finance for low- and moderate-income families.
Read More about New Ways to Understand the Impact of Auto Finance on Low-Income Families
Credit reports and scores reflect stunning racial disparities. Study after study has found that Black and Latino communities have lower credit scores as a group than whites and Asians. The racial disparities in credit scores are due to deep structural factors, created by centuries of intentional and legalized discrimination as well as present-day biases.
Over 17 million Americans are unbanked, relying on alternative, and often costly, financial services providers. Policymakers, consumer advocates and the banking industry are increasingly working to move people into the financial mainstream by promoting basic banking accounts. Prepaid cards have also been promoted as safe alternative transaction account. Indeed, the bank account and prepaid models…
Read More about Features of a Safe Basic Banking or Prepaid Card Account
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