CRL in the News

These companies can also wind up making money when consumers who use them make mistakes, Chabrier noted. “If you have, as many people do, five buy now pay later purchases and you make one false move, then you’re going to get hit with these unexpected fees,” she said, such as late fees if you miss a payment, “and maybe an overdraft fee from your bank.”

Blue Cross agreed in 1998 to the conversion law that included the provision for a charity trust should it become a for-profit company. Martin Eakes, co-founder of the Self-Help Credit Union and the Center for Responsible Lending helped negotiate the 1998 law. He opposes the new bill. “This bill is a betrayal of the public trust,” Eakes said.

In Rhode Island, people have been advocating for over 13 years against the practice of payday loans, which are high-cost loans structured to perpetuate an ongoing cycle of debt. As the Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) explains, “payday lenders are actually providing access to debt, not credit.”

The trend of turning to Buy Now, Pay Later products is concerning because they are not regulated or tracked enough and they don’t count as credit. So it’s easy to accumulate an uncontrollable amount of debt through that, according to Lucia Mattox, the director of western states outreach and senior policy manager at Center for Responsible Lending. “Because they [Buy Now, Pay Later payments] are tied to folks with a bank statement, they can go into overdraft easily,” Mattox said.

“The Biden-Harris Administration is providing needed breathing room in the tight budgets of families who use FHA mortgages, many of whom are first-time homebuyers, people of color, or individuals with lower-incomes,” said Mitria Spotser, vice president and federal policy director at the Center for Responsible Lending. “By reducing the cost of mortgage insurance premiums, the Administration is putting money back into people’s pockets. This move helps families strengthen their financial backstop and manage unexpected financial events while maintaining homeownership. The Administration has been

The bank's overdraft fee income came under fire in an Aug. 23, 2022, letter from the Center for Responsible Lending, or CRL, and other consumer advocates to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency urging the regulators to reject the planned merger. The CRL rarely presses regulators to strike down specific bank deal proposals.

Mitria Wilson-Spotser, vice president and federal policy director at the Center for Responsible Lending, made a similar argument, while also raising concerns about the impact the risks posed to policies such as the Qualified Mortgage rule. “The reason we have this housing appreciation, the reason why we have homeownership rates at the rate that we do in the United States today is because of that rule,” she told The Hill, while also saying she thinks “everything is up for play” if the Supreme Court ultimately rules against the CFPB’s funding structure in the case.

The interview explores the ramifications of the Supreme Court case about the federal consumer watchdog agency.

On Monday, Nadine Chabrier, a lawyer for the Center for Responsible Lending, said in a news release that the Supreme Court would be reviewing a lawsuit that poses “an existential threat” to the CFPB and similarly funded agencies. “If the Supreme Court accepts this deeply flawed argument against CFPB funding, it would set a dangerous precedent that would be used to challenge agencies with legally indistinguishable funding, including the Federal Reserve, FDIC, Medicare and Social Security,” Chabrier said.

According to research and complaints by the Center for Responsible Lending, TD charges U.S. customers more than $100 a day for overdrafts by levying $35 fees three times a day. These fees bear no relationship to the bank’s actual costs. They are purely opportunistic.