Borrow

Reverse mortgages let you cash in on the equity in your home: these mortgages can have serious implications.

Want to buy a business? Here’s how the Business Opportunity Rule can help you evaluate the opportunity — and the seller.

Some multilevel marketing plans are pyramid schemes, which are illegal and risky.

Thinking about an internet startup? The promise of big bucks and terrific working conditions can be tempting, but consider these factors before you hand over any money.

Collectors may not be able to sue you to collect old debts. The statute of limitations varies among states and for different kinds of debts.

What can you expect at trade-in when you owe more on your car than it’s worth?

Here’s “must know” information about when and how your car can be repossessed.

Financial literacy help for educators and students alike. The site offers a plain and simple approach to: Managing Your Money; Credit, Loans and Debt; and Scams and Identity Theft. The information has an easy-to-use, direct style that focuses on the basic information people need, along with the steps they need to take. Consumer.gov also has videos and audio read-alongs to support different learning styles and multi-tasking.

This paper tests for the presence of age and gender discrimination in the loan underwriting process. We modify the tools used during the past exams to test for racial discrimination and apply them here to test for the presence of disparate treatment on the basis of age and gender. Using HMDA data along with data from 18 fair lending exams recently conducted by the OCC, between1996 – 2001, we find no evidence of systematic discrimination on the basis of age or gender. Further, the tools used and tested for in this analysis are now readily available for use in future fair lending exams.

The exact cause of the massive defaults and foreclosures in the U.S. subprime mortgage market is still unclear. This paper investigates whether a particular aspect of borrowers' financial literacy—their numerical ability—may have played a role. We measure several aspects of financial literacy and cognitive ability in a survey of subprime mortgage borrowers who took out mortgages in 2006 or 2007 and match these measures to objective data on mortgage characteristics and repayment performance.