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This brochure explains about dealing with mortgage lenders. It tells you where to look, what to look for, and what takes place when you apply for a mortgage. Knowing what to expect, especially if you are a first-time homebuyer, may make it easier for you to get through the process.

Individual savings are critical for retirement as government and employer-based provisions fade or become less secure. Rural communities are vulnerable given their higher proportion of elderly and more who rely on Social Security. Using a telephone survey of working-age residents in Michigan's rural Upper Peninsula, this research investigates factors associated with participation in tax-advantaged retirement plans that have largely replaced defined-benefit pension plans for earmarked retirement savings.

This article summarizes the key findings and recommendations drawn from the FDIC Survey of Bank Efforts to Serve the Unbanked and Underbanked. It is intended to inform bankers, policymakers, and researchers of the results of the survey and to outline steps to improve access to the financial mainstream. Unbanked individuals and families are defined as those who have rarely, if ever, held a checking account, savings account, or other type of transaction or check-cashing account at an insured depository institution.

This short article briefly summarizes and provides a link to the final report on the FDIC Survey of Bank Efforts to Serve the Unbanked and Underbanked. The survey was conducted in 2008 and the report was released in 2009. The FDIC retained Dove Consulting to help administer the survey of banks during 2008. The voluntary survey consisted of mail-in questionnaires administered to a stratified random sample of about 1,300 banks. The nationally representative sample was selected from the population of federally insured banks and thrifts with retail branch operations.

This journal article examines how the surge in home values between 2000 and 2006 and the drop in prices since then are related to the demand for reverse mortgage loans in the United States. It also investigates the relationship between recent trends in reverse mortgages and borrower characteristisc such as age, gender and state/region of residence of the eligible homeowner(s). The results of the study provide insight into how consumer education, the Federal Goverment, the mortgage industry and financial planners can better educate the population about this type of financing.

Abstract: The main factors underlying the rise in mortgage defaults appear to be declines in house prices and deteriorated underwriting standards, in particular an increase in loan-to-value ratios and in the share of mortgages with little or no documentation of income.

This article provides a brief overview of the field of financial education and explores some of the challenges and potential solutions. The author describes developments in the contemporary financial education movement since the 1990s and the background economic changes that stimulated its growth; reviews currently available financial education initiatives for youth and adults and discusses the evidence about its effectiveness as well as broader challenges for the field. The article concludes by highlighting both general and specific examples of efforts to move the field forward.

This article presents best practices and lessons learnt from on the experiences of the National Endowment for Financial Education® (NEFE), a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan and noncommercial foundation committed to increas- ing access to financial education and to empowering in- dividuals to make positive and sound financial decision.

This article provides a plain-language description of behavioral economics and the role of common biases in financial decisionmaking, and reviews ways in which the findings of behavioral economics can help structure financial education and public policy.

This article provides an overview of bank-based financial education. The role of banks more generally is reviewed, and examples of Marshall and Isley (M&I) Bank's Consumer Education (CE) program are discussed. Evaluation methods used by M&I are described. Key factors for success include clearly defined priorities, a standardized high-quality curriculum, appropriately designed delivery, well-integrated assessment and evaluation, effective community partnerships and a willingness to provide supporting tools.