We’re excited to host a twitter chat about older Americans and money on May 9, 2013 from 3-4 p.m. EDT.
We’ll have financial experts taking questions on what older Americans can do to find out if their financial advisers are really experts in their needs.
To participate, tweet questions with the hashtag #SeniorMoney and follow us @CFPB.
Earlier this week, we hosted a Twitter chat along with Kids.gov. Financial experts, authors, and parents joined the #MoneyTalk and shared ideas and resources for talking to kids about money.
One question we saw frequently had to do with bringing up the topic of money for young kids. There were great ideas and suggestions in the chat. One thing you can try the next time you’re at the store is showing them the price tags and discussing how much their favorite foods cost. Let them watch as you check out, and if you pay in cash, let them hand the money to the cashier and receive the change.
Several folks brought up the idea of using games to teach preschoolers. Make it a fun learning experience and dump a pile of change in the middle of the floor and count pennies. Make stacks of five and explain that a stack is equal to one nickel, or that five stacks are equal to a quarter.
Other popular questions were about teaching teenagers about credit. It’s a subject that can be confusing even for adults, but here are some things to cover when introducing your teenager to credit. And, before your kid gets ready to leave the nest, here are ways to talk to them about saving and investing.
The most popular question was about finding ways to teach kids to save. We shared a fun way to do that using Pinterest.
There are many great ways to have the #MoneyTalk with your kids and we encourage you to start that conversation and keep it going.
Share your stories on Twitter and Pinterest using the hashtag #MoneyTalk!
We’re excited to host a twitter chat on talking to kids about money on April 24, 2013, from 2-4 p.m. EDT.
We’ll have financial experts taking questions on how to talk to kids about money and teach good financial behavior.
To participate, tweet questions with the hashtag #MoneyTalk and follow us @CFPB.
In the past year we have taken big steps toward making consumer financial markets work better for consumers and responsible companies, and consumer complaints have played a major role. We began with credit card complaints in July of 2011, and as time passed, we added complaints about mortgages, bank accounts and services, private student loans, vehicle, and other consumer loans.
We are proud to announce that, starting today, we are accepting complaints about credit reports.
Credit reporting touches the financial lives of nearly each and every American. Credit reports affect whether or not you are able to get a credit card, a home loan, an auto loan, or a student loan, the ability to rent an apartment or get hired, and even tasks as simple as getting a cell phone or electricity for your home. It also can affect how affordable or expensive those things are for you.
Starting today, we can help consumers with individual-level complaint assistance on issues with their credit report. The types of complaints we can work on include:
If you believe that there’s incorrect information on your credit report, or if you have an issue with a credit reporting company’s investigation start by filing a dispute and getting a response directly from the credit reporting company itself.
There are important consumer rights guaranteed by federal consumer financial law that are best preserved by you first going through the credit reporting company’s complaint process.
After you file a complaint with the credit reporting company, if you are dissatisfied with the resolution, file a complaint with us.
Every complaint we receive helps us understand the challenges facing consumers, and they inform and shape our priorities. Reading your complaints about credit reporting will complement work we have already started in this area, including conducting a study comparing credit scores sold to creditors and those sold to consumers and beginning to supervise of consumer reporting agencies.
Scott Pluta is the Assistant Director for the Office of Consumer Response at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Update 11/27/12: We issued a bulletin about changes to the rule we intend to propose in December 2012.
Our goal is to make financial markets work. A crucial part of reaching that goal is making sure that honest businesses – particularly small businesses – have what they need to understand and comply with our new regulations, which are designed both to help consumers and make a fair playing field for companies that play by the rules.
Today, we’re releasing our small business compliance guide for our international electronic money transfers rule (also known as the remittance rule), which will take effect on February 7, 2013. This guide will make it easier to understand the new requirements. Although the guide is not a substitute for the rule, it highlights issues that businesses, in particular small businesses and those that work with them, should consider while implementing the new requirements.
We need your help to find areas in the guide that could be better.
Email comments about the guide to CFPB_RemittanceGuide@cfpb.gov. Your feedback is crucial to making sure the guide is as helpful as possible. We would love to hear your thoughts on its usefulness and readability, and about improvements you think are needed.
We would especially like to know:
1) What kind of business do you operate?
2) Generally, what is the size of your business?
3) Where are you located?
4) How useful did you find the guide for understanding the rule?
5) How useful did you find the guide for implementing the rule at your business?
6) Do you have any suggestions for making the guide better, such as additional implementation tips?
We are working on a number of projects to help industry understand and comply with the new requirements, including:
You can reach us at (202) 435-7700.
We’re excited to announce that we’re no longer in beta with our consumer complaint database.
We launched the beta version on June 19th publishing individual-level consumer complaint data — a first for a federal financial regulator.
Since that time, people have been evaluating and sharing the data on social media and in new apps. Today, we are taking additional steps to expand this service to the American people.
First, and as promised, we are releasing consumer credit card complaint data back to December 1, 2011 in the Consumer Complaint Database.
Second, thanks to all of the great feedback and insight we’ve gotten, we are removing the database’s beta tag. While we will continue to expand functionality, data fields, and the “look and feel” of the database, after performing for three months as designed and without incident, the database is no longer a beta product.
One potential area for database expansion is the inclusion of additional products and services. Over the summer we asked for public comment on this idea and got a wide range of comments from a range of interested stakeholders. We are in the process of evaluating those comments and anticipate a final Bureau decision in early 2013.
In addition to expanding the scope of the products covered by the database we continue to evaluate, among other things, the release of consumer narratives, the potential for normalization of the data to make apples-to-apples comparisons more user friendly, and the expansion of functionality to improve user experience.
Thank you for your help in getting the tool where it is today – we’re excited for what you’ll do with the data next.
Scott Pluta is the Assistant Director for Consumer Response at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
