Manassas Consumer Protection Blog

Federal law protects consumers against abusive debt collectors.

The federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, often referred to as the FDCPA, is a consumer protection law that shields people from abusive or deceptive debt collection activity. Here we will discuss the protections of the FDCPA when a debt collector tries to collect on a stale debt such as an old credit card balance that is time barred because the statute of limitations has run.

A federal lawsuit will now go forward to consider whether the company's people profiles violate federal law.

The National Consumer Assistance Plan will improve the quality of the data used by credit bureaus to calculate credit scores of consumers.

Beginning on July 2, 2017, the three main credit bureaus - TransUnion, Experian and Equifax - tightened the standards applied to tax-lien and civil-judgment data the bureaus use to assess consumer creditworthiness. Pursuant to the National Consumer Assistance Plan, these liens and judgments, both existing and new, must now include the person's name, address and another identifier: either date of birth or Social Security number, sometimes called an SSN.

Divorce is one of the leading causes of bankruptcy, but there are ways to avoid the financial turmoil.

Divorce and bankruptcy, as Divorce Magazine notes, often seem to go hand in hand. Financial problems are one of the leading causes of divorce and divorce itself can cause such an upheaval in one's finances that many divorcees are left with no option but to declare bankruptcy. While there is no denying that divorce takes a financial toll even in the best of circumstances, there are ways to protect one's credit and stay on a sound financial footing once a marriage comes to an end. Below is a look at some tips for staying afloat moneywise when going through a divorce.