Has your credit card interest rate ever risen at the end of a low introductory period? Did you miss those extras fees or restrictions on availability buried deep in the fine print? Have you ever looked at the loan documents and just not understood what they meant but signed because your mortgage broker and/or bank said sign here?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, help may be on the way. However before the help gets here you, the consumer, will need to help the effort get off the ground.
Sign upDodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in July of 2010, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has launched its website ahead of the implementation of many of the Acts provisions in July of 2011. Currently, the website and the agency itself are both in the beginning stages of construction and taking suggestions on how to implement the mission of the Bureau and how to communicate with the very public that it is designed to serve.
This is an opportunity to be heard, and while many individuals are rightfully skeptical about whether anyone in Washington is listening to the people, this opportunity should not be wasted. The main purpose of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is to make information available to the consumers in a manner which is clear, concise, and also allows the consumer to consider all of the fees and cost to make an informed decision when applying for credit.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s stated mission is to Educate, Enforce, and Study the consumer and consumer lending practices in an effort to level the playing field between Wall Street and Main Street. It is a laudable goal, one whose ultimate success may be hard to measure or impossible to reach, but it starts with reaching out to the consumer for input. This is a chance for consumers to speak their mind, and a chance to finally enlarge the fine print.
