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Making a financial decision soon? There’s a website that can help you make a better decision.
Let’s face it. Making financial decisions is hard. As a consumer, it’s scary to enter into a financial agreement with an unfamiliar company whose goal is to profit from you. Of course the company promotes itself with the best possible image. But can you trust their advertisements, websites, and promotions? Can you understand their legalese? Probably not.
You need to talk to actual customers, the consumers who have used the product or service that you are considering. But what if you don’t actually know anyone?
Luckily for United States consumers needing to find a bank or apply for a loan or credit card, there is a solution to this problem. A government agency tracks real people’s complaints and the data from the last 10 years is available on the Consumer Complaints Database website. Best of all, it is free to use. And you can see the company’s response and if the response was timely.
The site offers all kinds of ways to slice and dice the data so that you can find information related to your situation. You can filter multiple ways, including:
- Date of complaint
- Product (for example, ‘mortgage’ or ‘vehicle loan/lease’)
- Issue (for example, ‘fees or interest’ or ‘opening an account’)
- Location of the complaint (state or zip code)
- Company name (for example ‘Mr. Cooper Group Inc’ or ‘EQUIFAX, INC.)
- Keyword (for example, ‘Platinum’ or ‘security’)
- Tags (for example ‘‘Older American’ or ‘Servicemember’)
Now that you see the data available, let’s walk-through three examples of using the complaint data to inform your financial decisions.
For the first example, let’s say you are considering getting a new credit card. You’ve narrowed it down to two companies, Company 1 and Company 2. Their terms and offers seem similar so you are having a hard time deciding. You can use the website to compare the number of complaints for Company 1 vs. Company 2 for the last two years.
Maybe you’ve had the problem in the past disputing a charge on your current credit card, making this issue top of mind. Using the filtering options, you can search for the issue “Problem with a purchase shown on your statement” for Company 1 and Company 2.
Perhaps you’re concerned about the application process. Using the filtering options, you can search for complaints about the issue “Getting a credit card” to see if one company has an easier application process than the other.
Possibly you have two credit card options from the same company and you cannot decide between them. You can do a keyword search for the first card type (such as “Platinum Select Card”) and search a second time for “Gold Select Card” and compare the numbers of complaints.
For the second example, consider the agonizing decision of student loans. To research, you could limit the product to “Student Loan” and compare Company 1 to Company 2. You could compare the number of complaints over time and also look for upward trends in the number of complaints for both companies. You could also verify if the companies resolve complaints in a timely manner.
A third example is if a new company buys your existing mortgage. You normally don’t have any input or control in this situation. You receive notice of the mortgage transfer and you will need to interact with the new company monthly, likely for decades. For this situation, research the most common complaints about the new company, so that you know what to expect. If you see many complaints about setting up automatic drafts, then you can proactively allot more time to the initial setup steps and make a plan to double-check the drafts for correctness.
These are only three examples of how the Consumer Complaints Database can help you navigate financial decisions. Once you understand the data that is available, you can use the website to conduct research that helps you and your specific situation, to hopefully get a little peace of mind about your financial decisions.