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If you’re having trouble paying your mortgage, we can help you get connected to a HUD-approved housing counselor at no cost to you. The counselor can help you work with your servicer or lender to try to avoid foreclosure, organize your finances, understand your mortgage options, and find a solution that works for you.

Get foreclosure help.

How to spot a scam

Mortgage loan modification scams are designed to take your money by making a false promise of saving you from foreclosure. Scammers may:

• Ask you to pay high fees upfront to receive services,
• Promise to get you a loan modification,
• Ask you to sign over title to your property,
• Ask you to sign papers that you do not understand,
• Say you should start making payments to someone other than your servicer or lender,
• Claim to be conducting a “forensic audit,” or
• Tell you to stop making mortgage loan payments altogether.

Companies that offer mortgage relief services aren’t allowed to collect any fees until they give you a written offer from your servicer or lender that you decide is acceptable. A mortgage relief company must also tell you that:

• The company is not associated with the government;
• Your lender may not agree to modify your loan; and
• If the company tells you to stop paying your mortgage, that you can lose your home and damage your credit.

If you think you have been scammed

File a complaint online or call us at (855) 411-CFPB (2372) from 8 a.m. – 8 p.m. ET, Monday-Friday.

Share this with #ForeclosureHelpIsFree

It can be hard for people to talk about finances, especially if they’re in trouble. Even if you’re not facing foreclosure yourself, please share a link to this advice with your networks using the hashtag #ForeclosureHelpisFree. You’ll never know who you might be able to help.

It can be hard to understand the language of financial products and services. Just what exactly is a grace period? What about an ARM? A balloon payment? And while the Internet can serve up an answer, how can you be sure it’s the right one?

Ask CFPB, a new interactive online tool from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), can help.

Say you’re thinking about buying a home. You could type in a question to Ask CFPB’s search box, or you could browse the list of questions in the Mortgage category. Once you’ve done a search, you can also filter by topic, like “fees” or “closing,” or by populations, like servicemembers, students, and older Americans.

Ask CFPB contains three general categories of questions and answers:

1. Definitions: Financial products and terms are often described in industry jargon. Ask CFPB translates the jargon into clear definitions. You can get answers to questions like, “What is a credit report?” or “What is a reverse mortgage?”
2. Explanations: Financial products can include many complicated terms and features, and it can be difficult for you to understand how they work. Ask CFPB provides you with general information and explanations on terms and features of financial products.
3. Situations: Ask CFPB arms you with information and tips to help you navigate various situations. For example, you can use to the tool to ask, “What if my lender quoted me one rate at application but raised it at closing?”

Ask CFPB also lets you provide feedback. You can rate an answer “Helpful,” “Too long,” “Confusing,” or “Incorrect.” And if you don’t find the answer you’re looking for, you can submit a question for consideration.

Our Ask CFPB database currently contains more than 350 questions and answers, primarily focused on credit cards and mortgages. In the coming months, the CFPB will continue to build the database to answer questions about a range of financial products and services, including student loans, auto loans, checking and savings accounts, and prepaid cards.

So visit consumerfinance.gov/askcfpb, take a look, and let us know what you think!

One of the most popular features on this site is an interactive copy of Elizabeth Warren’s calendar, which includes an RSS feed and the raw calendar data. We think it is already the richest, most detailed leadership calendar that a .gov web site has offered to date, and we hope to make it even better. Today, we want to share a bit of the work that goes into creating and updating this tool.

The calendar was a high priority for the web site launch. The question wasn’t if we would provide Professor Warren’s full calendar, but how. We figured the effort would be smooth sailing from there.

We were wrong. We learned very quickly why interactive leadership calendars are rare: they’re hard. Getting this calendar from Professor Warren’s computer to the web takes a lot of planning, technical work, and ongoing maintenance.

The calendar Professor Warren uses on a day-to-day basis is maintained in a desktop application. Fortunately, that application lets you save a calendar as an .ics file, a standard calendar format that many applications can interpret. (A key component of openness is using open, cross-compatible data formats when possible.) At the end of every month, we save a copy of that month’s events as an .ics file. That lets us work with the calendar without altering the original.

The next step is the redaction process under the Freedom of Information Act. Any given month contains several events with information that may be personal or pre-decisional. For example, if Professor Warren interviews a job candidate or has dinner at someone’s home, we must remove the candidate’s name or the address of the home. Such redactions are noted on the calendar as “REDACTED”. Clicking on the event will give you more information about the nature of the deleted information.

We save the redactions back to the source file, a step that is much harder than it sounds. This way, the modified file can be moved to an internal testing, or “staging,” version of our web site. This test is the most labor-intensive task of the whole process. We triple-check that the information we’re about to put online contains no personal information. We can’t be certain unless we check the raw source file; combing through that metadata is quite a chore. To give you an idea of what we’re looking through, the image below is an example of what that data looks like.

Going through this process just once was enough to give us a new appreciation for open government projects. This is painstaking work, and it took us weeks to figure out the process. Each cycle has taught us lessons that streamline the workflow, cutting the process down and increasing our efficiency.

Yesterday, we added February’s calendar to the December and January calendars we posted earlier. We have also back-filled the calendar with October’s and November’s events. We hope the calendar can serve as a starting point for more open government initiatives as we continue building this consumer bureau.

Each day this week, we will feature information about an important milestone in the establishment of the new consumer bureau. Today’s post – the first in the series – is about the launch of ConsumerFinance.gov.

Almost six months before the consumer bureau’s “designated transfer date” of July 21, 2011, the CFPB implementation team launched ConsumerFinance.gov.

The website aims to open up a line of communication with people across the country. The team will reach out for ideas, input, and feedback on the work already underway and on new initiatives commencing in the weeks, months, and years ahead. The site will also serve as a source of information about what the new consumer bureau is up to, trying to provide as much visibility as possible about its development. In addition, the site will be a valuable tool in recruiting talent to join the staff of the CFPB.

One component of the new website is an application for communicating directly with the American people: “Open for Suggestions.” This feature encourages communication directly with the CFPB implementation team through YouTube video questions, but suggestions can also be accepted through e-mail and other forms of online communication. Comments from the public will help the CFPB implementation team understand what consumers and financial services providers need and will inform the work of the consumer bureau.

The website also features an interactive display of Elizabeth Warren’s appointment calendar – one of the items most frequently requested by the public – and an animated video narrated by Ron Howard to introduce the CFPB and to explain the important role it will play.

The CFPB is America’s first 21st-century consumer agency, and this website – though still only in its beta phase – is one way the consumer bureau can introduce itself to the American public.

Welcome to the online home of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). This new bureau is in the construction phase, but we’re already hard at work on plans to make consumer financial products and services clearer for Americans—putting in place building blocks that will enable us to improve disclosures, enforce new consumer protections established by Congress, protect consumers from deceptive, unfair, and abusive practices, and allow financial services providers to compete on a level playing field.

The consumer bureau will get much of its legal authority in July 2011. We’re launching this website almost six months in advance for only one reason: to listen to the American public. Hearing from you today will help us develop our plans for tomorrow.

Today, we kick off our virtual listening tour with Open for Suggestions.

In the coming days, weeks, and months, we’ll provide consumers with many different opportunities to connect with us. We’ll have regular blog updates, digital town halls, and many more ways to share thoughts with your new CFPB.

Together, we have an opportunity to create a new consumer bureau that’s focused on making the market for consumer financial products and services work. And, we’re hiring! You can learn more by checking out our Jobs page.

Finally, this is only the start of the conversation. You can follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Flickr, and provide an email address so we can keep you informed of the most important updates about your CFPB.