| Volume 131 Number 9 |
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The People’s Lawyer’s Tip of the Day
Avoid using your bank password for any other sites. Fraudsters know many people reuse passwords and with stolen information they can try to access bank accounts. Using unique passwords helps reduce this risk. Click here for more.
CFPB Suing Largest Student Loan Provider
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is suing the nation’s largest servicer of both federal and private student loans for systematically and illegally failing borrowers at every stage of repayment. For years, Navient, formerly part of Sallie Mae, created obstacles to repayment by providing bad information, processing payments incorrectly, and failing to act when borrowers complained. Through shortcuts and deception, the company also illegally cheated many struggling borrowers out of their rights to lower repayments, which caused them to pay much more than they had for their loans. The CFPB seeks to recover significant relief for the borrowers harmed by these illegal servicing failures. Click here for more.
Your Money
Is putting 20% down to buy a home still recommended? If you’re weighing your down payment options before buying a home, here are a few things to consider. It’s a gamble to purchase a home you plan to sell within a short time frame (three to five years), but if that’s the plan, the cost of a 20% down payment could wash out the savings of a lower monthly payment. Or if you prefer a larger emergency fund, plan to invest liquid assets elsewhere, or need cash to put toward a home remodel, you may want to protect your liquidity by minimizing the amount of your down payment. However, consider that to mitigate the additional risk of lending to a borrower with a small down payment, lenders usually require private mortgage insurance for conventional loans until the homeowner has at least 20% equity in the home. Click here for more.
For the Lawyers
A conjunctive DTPA award is not preclusive in bankruptcy court as to any independent basis for the award standing alone. A U.S. District Court in Texas reversed a bankruptcy court’s summary judgment that a state court judgment was preclusive and the debt was nondischargeable. The court noted, when a state-court judgment does not contain sufficiently detailed findings to meet the federal nondischargeability test, the court should look beyond the judgment and examine the jury instructions and evidence produced in the state-court proceedings that support the judgment. Disjunctive jury instructions in state-court judgments make it difficult for a bankruptcy court to give preclusive effect to that judgment in deciding whether the judgment debt is nondischargable. In re Dang (S.D. Tex. 2016). Click here for more.