North Carolina

Dear Coalition Supporters, This update covers important predatory lending developments over the past few months, including action at the NC General Assembly, challenge of the payday rule in Congress (spoiler, we won!), threats to our state usury cap, rollback of federal student loan protections, and recent CRL research. NC General Assembly: What Happened? House Bill 810, backed by the NC-based BB&T, would have tripled the origination fee on consumer loans issued by NC-chartered banks to $150, and could have more than tripled the late fee by increasing the fee to $35. Most worrisome was the...

Dear Coalition supporters, At a time when victories are hard to come by, please take a minute to celebrate a big win! We stopped Congress from rolling back the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s national payday rule. Last week, the clock ran out on efforts to use the fast-track Congressional Review Act to repeal the rule and prevent the bureau from regulating payday and car title lenders in the future. They didn’t have the votes they needed to pass H.J. Resolution 122, the payday CRA. With strong opposition from so many fronts, members of Congress realized that the price was too high to...

In our January 2017 CRL Issue Brief, States without Payday and Car-title Lending Save $5 Billion in Fees Annually, we estimated that consumers in states without payday and car title lending save over $5 billion in fees each year – $2.2 billion in payday fees saved, plus another $2.8 billion in car title fees saved. In this earlier Issue Brief, we also estimated that consumers in North Carolina save over $457 million in payday and car title fees every year, $255 million in payday fee savings and another $202 million in car title fee savings. Of the 32 states with payday and/or car title fee...

Over 100 North Carolina organizations have joined this state sign-on letter to strongly oppose payday lending. These groups include military and veterans associations, faith organizations, housing and credit counseling agencies, rural, business, civil rights, seniors and labor groups, among many others. They urge our North Carolina congressional delegation to strongly oppose H.J. Resolution 122 and S.J. Resolution 56, fast-track measures that would repeal the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s payday rule. These bills not only repeal the rule, they also prevent the consumer bureau from...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE October 5, 2017 North Carolina Consumer Protections Remain Crucial As CFPB Releases New Payday Lending Rule North Carolina Usury Cap Keeps Loan Sharks at Bay Durham, NC — While consumers in states that are burdened by predatory payday lending will benefit from a final rule issued today by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), North Carolina has already eliminated payday lending altogether and established a 30% interest rate cap for consumer loans. Our cap is a much more effective protection than the CFPB rule, as it saves North Carolina families over $457...

Our top priorities for the 2017 NC General Assembly session were to keep payday and car title lenders out of North Carolina, to defend our strong debt buyer and debt collection protections and our strong mortgage lending protections, and to look for opportunities to strengthen other lending protections while guarding against any proposals to weaken them. This 2017 session of the NC General Assembly was dominated by attempts to weaken Gubernatorial powers, address fallout from the “bathroom bill”, and redraw state district maps under court order. But legislators still found time to help...