Posts tagged as:

loans

Wells Fargo Sued For Reducing Home Equity Credit Lines

August 21, 2009

In Illinois class action complaint (PDF), a homeowner alleges Wells Fargo violated federal regulators’ warnings by reducing credit limits on all accounts in a geographic area without assessing the value of the actual houses.
The homeowner accuses Wells Fargo of using “unreliable or inaccurate analyses” to determine property values—using computer models to predict home values—rather than [...]

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Judge Slaps Ameriquest Hard For Selling Mortgage, Then Pretending To Still Own It

June 1, 2009

My monthly column for Consumerist: Judge Slaps Ameriquest Hard For Selling Mortgage, Then Pretending To Still Own It | Consumerist

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Why is Obama silent on bankruptcy reform?

May 19, 2009

The Red Tape Chronicles asks whether Obama is “backing the wrong horse” by championing credit card reform while ignoring bankruptcy reform that would allow bankruptcy judges to reduce mortgage loans in bankruptcy—just like they can do for all other debts. Credit card reform is a great thing, of course, but it will have a tiny [...]

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Link roundup

May 14, 2009

Time to clean out my Google Reader queue.

How to complain about: credit report errors | The Red Tape Chronicles
Does it make sense to pay “points” upfront to lower your interest rate? Decoding the Mysterious Mortgage Points Game | Alpha Consumer
What’s The New Credit Card Reform Bill All About? | Consumerist
Stop fighting bankruptcy. When bankruptcy is [...]

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6 things you should never say to a car salesman

July 11, 2008

When shopping for a car, the following statements mark you as a big sucker:

“I love, love, love this car”
“I need to get a car by tomorrow”
“I need a monthly payment of . . .”
“My trade-in is outside”
“I don’t know anything about leasing”
“My credit is a little spotty”

6 things never to tell a car salesman | [...]

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Big surprise: greedy subprime security buyers didn’t listen to their own consultants

May 28, 2008

Tracy Warren was a quality-control consultant for Bear Stearns and other mortgage security purchasers on Wall Street. Her job was to review mortgage loans to determine whether they had merit for investment purposes. (She saw the loans after they were made, but before they were sold to investors and led to the national economy’s crash-and-burn [...]

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More on the HELOC freeze from SmartMoney.com

April 24, 2008

More on the HELOC freeze from SmartMoney.com (with a shout out to yours truly).

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The housing market mess; connecting some dots

February 21, 2008

It is getting time for a complete overhaul of the whole housing market in the US, rather than just messing with edges. Two different stories in the Minneapolis StarTribune this morning illustrate why.
First is the story about all the people applying for Section 8 assistance. Recently about 3,700 people took applications, for one of [...]

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Preying on the elderly, payday lenders’ newest victims

February 12, 2008

How much worse can things get?
According to a new article in the WSJ, those wonderful community financial services people, more commonly know as Payday lenders are increasingly targeting recipients of Social Security and other government benefits, including disability and veteran’s benefits.

But it isn’t just the Payday lenders who are involved in this abuse of our [...]

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Payday loans the not so cheap alternative

February 8, 2008

Apparently, all those happy payday loan customers who quickly repaid their loans, avoided disaster and extra costs doesn’t included a lot of people in Utah.
In a really great article full of all kinds of interesting facts by the Desert Morning News, their research found that payday lenders have sued nearly 27,000 Utahns for nonpayment since [...]

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Mortgage securitizers fiddle as Rome burns

February 7, 2008

The NYTimes has a piece on the 5th Annual Conference of the American Securitization Forum held in Las Vegas. These are the guys who played a major role in bring us the current foreclosure mess. Well while the rest of the country and the world for that matter mucks its way out of the mess [...]

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Alternatives to payday loans: small dollar loans

February 7, 2008

In what is hopefully the start of something, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) announced the selection of 30 banks to participate in a two-year pilot project to help identify best practices in affordable small-dollar loan programs that can be replicated by financial institutions.
“Our goal is to identify small-dollar loan programs that are profitable for [...]

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Payday loans: countering the spin

February 5, 2008

Elizabeth Warren at Credit Slips (a great blog I just now learned of on credit and bankruptcy by six academics) has a great post touching on some of the payday loan research including the the Center for Responsible Lending (PDF link), the Center for Community Capital (PDF link) and the the bad numbers in the [...]

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Payday loans only delay trouble

February 5, 2008

In all the back and forth on payday loans in the press and blogosphere, a study titled NC Consumers after Payday Lending by the Center for Community Capital at Univ. of North Carolina does seem to be getting as much play as it should. Though the Community Financial Services Association of America (CFSA), the trade [...]

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36% interest rate cap

January 26, 2008

Over at Consumer Rights Watch, Mark Ireland has stated two truths about Payday lending:
1. Payday lending is a business that simply keeps people in debt, rather than provide them with an emergency safety net, and
2. Only enforcement of a comprehensive interest rate cap at or around 36 percent for small loans will solve the debt [...]

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Mortgage denials for Native Americans

January 2, 2008

In light of all the subprime lending mess, in which “No Doc loan” credit applications were often based on largely fictional income, and brokers and banks where playing all sorts of games to get people into high interest subprime loans, the Fargo Forum analysis of home loan applications for 2006 found that lenders denied one [...]

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Payday loan to pay your mortgage?

December 18, 2007

The headline says it all “ A low, low interest rate of 396 percent” According to this article at CNN a large number of people in foreclosure counseling in Ohio, land of many a payday lender) also have payday loans. If that isn’t a recipe for disaster, what is?
Of note also is that a Republican [...]

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Mortgage fraud, another Enron?

November 30, 2007

The StarTribune reported today on another criminal investigation of mortgage fraud. While it is a good thing that someone is going after these people for the fraud they have committed, it would have been much better if someone had been guarding the hen house in the first place. The eggs are now gone and a [...]

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Profits of a payday lender

November 29, 2007

I was cruising the web and found this site on payday lending. It has all kinds of stuff about how to run a store. One of the links in the “learning center” is on the profitability of payday and check advance lending. Based on their projections Payday lending is a hell of a business.
If you [...]

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Being proactive with your debt

April 24, 2007

It is tempting to talk about consumers who “find themselves in default” on a loan. But consumers rarely end up in default by accident, if ever. And really, there is no excuse. I see a lot of consumers who defaulted on their mortgage, credit cards, medical bills, or other loans. I often ask whether they [...]

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