Home Mortgage Disclosure Act - HMDA
Categories: Mortgage, Real Estate
Being the victim of an overshare can be really uncomfortable. The stranger at the pharmacy who tells us all about his mysterious rash…the sweet old lady in our apartment building who gives us way too many details about her rediscovered romance with her husband, etc. There are some things out there in the world that we just, uh...really don’t want to know about.
But information about mortgages isn’t one of those things, which is why the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (its nickname is HMDA, pronounced “hmm-duh”) was introduced in 1975. This act forces mortgage lenders to publish accurate information about loan applications they’ve received, including how much the loans were for, what the credentials and demographics of the applicant were, the location of the homes people were trying to buy, and whether or not the application was approved. This has been good for the government, because not only do they have all kinds of interesting info about would-be homebuyers in the U.S., but they can also make sure banks and lenders aren’t being shady with their loans. It’s been great for the rest of us too, because we can check the data for different lenders when we’re looking to buy our next home.
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Finance: What is the Fair Credit Reporti...4 Views
Finance a la shmoop what is the Fair Credit Reporting Act? alright so think
old the Englande it's 1604 and your family is still working the barley [Family carrying barley]
fields because great-great-grandfather smeltwagon wasn't very good at rolling
the bones he lost a lot of money so yeah great-great grandpappy ended up with
gambling losses getting him into massive debt with over 97 farthings worth of [farthings drop into a bag]
debt accumulated after 20 years of bad gambling bones so in England well they
would either torture you until you found a way to pay off your debts either
legally or not or they would just throw you your family and your progeny into
essentially a work camp for generations and in fact it was this unfairness that
led to the notion of no taxation without representation in our own Constitution [US constitution appears]
so as the world turned the notion of credit fairness actually became a thing
and eventually the Fair Credit Reporting Act was established in 1970 and of
course it gave rise to the store Credit Reporting Act first adopted by Sears
where America well used to shop yeah I remember Sears catalog that was
called the Amazon back in the day all right with enormous abuse of the
credit system the haves or if the educated or the wealthy were able to get
away with nearly everything just shy of murder while the uneducated well they [Arrow points to uneducated people]
suffered the key driver in credit or an individual's access to borrowing money
revolves around the manner or form in which their credit scores were reported
and calculated in all that stuff so if you're educated you kind of know how to [Students playing video games]
game the system right and in fact with no structure behind credit reporting the
system was simply not trustworthy and it had to be codified or made into cookie
cutter nuggets each of which treated those seeking a credit score equally and
fairly individuals were able to petition to correct bad information that had
somehow leaked into their system like inaccurate information like it would do
that and sit there and haunt you for decades they were also allowed to
actually access their score and amazingly in the past people did not [Credit score rises]
necessarily have the right to view their own credit score how
weird and finally bad credit stopped being a cattle brand that lived with an
individual for their entire life new amendments allowed people to remove bad
credit annotations by paying off their debts along with the penalty and then
having good credit for three four five years after which time the negative
frowny faces were removed from their credit ratings sheets
so yeah credit reporting was finally fair and people were finally able to you [Cattle brand credit score appears]
know go in for cattle brand removal that's gotta hurt...