The Survive and Thrive Boomer Guide

5 signs your marriage is over

By Adam J. Edelstein, attorney and partner, Edelsteins, Faegenburg & Brown

Guest Blogger

Relations are complicated, and when things begin to get difficult in a marriage, people wonder whether they should continue to work on it or admit defeat.

Here are five things which may show your marriage is over:

1. You don’t communicate

In one study, 53 percent of couples reported that a lack of communication was a core reason for their divorce. In any relationship, communication is crucial to build on a foundation of honesty and trust. When you and your partner won’t address relationship issues or share in each other’s joy, you’ve lost that connection. 

If this critical connection is damaged beyond repair, your marriage could be on a slippery slope toward divorce.

New information for those selecting a nursing home

By Brian O’Connell, Analyst, insuranceQuotes.com

Guest blogger

Finding the right nursing home for an elderly family member is a serious responsibility, and often a daunting task. But many Americans aren’t aware of the tools that the federal government provides to make the search smoother and more trustworthy.

The U.S. Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services rolled out its new Five-Star Quality Rating System in April, with the goal to help families compare local nursing homes and get key questions answered.

The CMS’s website rates nursing homes on a scale of one to five stars, taking into consideration three key areas: health inspections, staffing, and quality measures.

CFPB, state file lawsuit against companies offering high-interest credit offers

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or CFPB and the South Carolina Department of Consumer Affairs filed a lawsuit Tuesday in federal court against Katharine Snyder, Performance Arbitrage Company Inc., and Life Funding Options Inc. The companies, owned and operated by Snyder, brokered contracts offering high-interest credit to veterans, many of whom are disabled, and to other consumers.

The CFPB alleges that the companies and their owner violated the Consumer Financial Protection Act’s prohibition against deceptive practices.

The CFPB and South Carolina allege that Snyder and her companies misrepresented to consumers that the contracts the companies broker are valid and enforceable when the contracts are void under federal and state law; misrepresented to consumers that the product is a sale of payments and not a high-interest credit offer; and failed to inform consumers of the products’ interest rates.

Corporations keep breaking the law due to declining federal prosecutions

Corporations keep breaking the law, and the U.S. Department of Justice keeps refusing to prosecute them, a Public Citizen report finds. The DOJ’s continued refusal to bring criminal prosecutions against big banks, big pharma, and other big businesses that violate the law has led to a failure to deter repeat offenders, according to the report.

Instead of prosecuting corporations, the DOJ, starting in the early 2000s, has increasingly relied on agreements that prosecutors and corporate defense attorneys negotiate behind closed doors to keep corporations – usually the largest – out of the criminal justice system.

“If the Justice Department wants to deter corporate crime, it must stop bending over backward to protect corporations and start enforcing the law,” said Rick Claypool, a Public Citizen research director and author of the report. “Our country is facing an unprecedented corporate crime wave. To stop it, we must prosecute corporate criminals.”

CFPB says it will continue to offer consumer complaint database and enhance it

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or CFPB announced Wednesday that it will continue to maintain its consumer complaint database while making “enhancements” to the information available to users. These enhancements include providing financial information and details into the complaint process to better address questions and inform consumers before they issue a complaint and adding materials to help consumers who seek answers to specific questions from financial companies.

“This announcement is a victory for both consumers and the marketplace,” said Ed Mierzwinski, senior director, Federal Consumer Programs for U.S. PIRG. “Over the years, U.S. PIRG, in comments and public statements, has championed the need to maintain a public CFPB consumer complaint database because it’s common sense that markets work better for consumers and companies when both sides have full information.” 
 
Mierzwinski said the series of U.S. PIRG reports using the database have clearly shown that the it serves as a powerful tool to help consumers make choices and also gives watchdog groups, academics, and the private sector a way to analyze and highlight problems.

CFPB and seven states launch ‘innovation network’ that will approve new risky financial products and protect them from enforcement

Under the Trump administration, the federal agency that’s supposed to protect consumers from Wall Street and financial predators has thought of yet another way to strip consumers of their protections. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or CFPB announced Tuesday that, working with seven state regulators, it launched the American Consumer Financial Innovation Network or ACFIN, a network that it said would "enhance coordination among federal and state regulators to facilitate financial innovation."

The CFPB invited all state regulators to join ACFIN, and the attorneys general of Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Indiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah took the offer.

Consumer advocates criticized the CFPB action because it gives banks, fintech companies, and other corporations no-action letters and approvals that will protect companies from enforcement and determine potentially new risky financial products and services to be in compliance with the law.

Google-YouTube $170 million settlement for violations of kids’ privacy law too weak, critics say

Google and its subsidiary YouTube agreed to pay a record $170 million Wednesday to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission and New York Attorney General’s Office that YouTube illegally collected personal information from children without their parents’ consent.

The settlement requires Google and YouTube to pay $136 million to the FTC and $34 million to New York for allegedly violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act Rule. The $136 million penalty is the largest amount the FTC has gotten in a COPPA case since the law was enacted in 1998.

In a lawsuit filed against the companies, the agencies allege that YouTube violated the COPPA Rule by collecting personal information – identifiers that track users across the Internet – from viewers of child-directed channels, without notifying parents and getting their consent. YouTube earned millions of dollars by using the identifiers – cookies – to deliver targeted ads to viewers, according to the lawsuit.

What to do about your virtual valuables as you get older

As consumers spend more time online and on their devices, they accumulate digital assets. Digital asset are something of value or significance created online or on a mobile phone, laptop, or tablet. 

As consumers age, they may want to consider transferring their digital assets to someone else. They might also want to include something related to their financial life that they may need to refer to later. Examples of digital assets could include the funds in a PayPal account or the downloadable PDF for a yearly tax filing from online tax preparation software.  

Here are tips from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s blog to help you create a plan for your digital assets:

Attorneys general and telecommunications companies join to stop robocalls

Fifty-one attorneys general announced an agreement Thursday with 12 telecommunications providers on a set of principles intended to limit and prevent robocalls. The providers have agreed to incorporate these principles into their business practices.

This agreement comes from the work of a group of attorneys general who in 2018 formed the Robocall Technologies Working Group. The group collaborated with telecommunication providers to make it more difficult for scammers to use robocall technologies to intrude on and defraud consumers.

All 50 states and the District of Columbia have joined this agreement with the following telecommunication companies: AT&T, Bandwidth, CenturyLink, Charter, Comcast, Consolidated, Frontier, Sprint, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular, Verizon, and Windstream.

iBuying costs sellers more, study shows

What is iBuying? iBuyers purchase homes from sellers at a lower than market price based on proprietary algorithms, pay the seller almost immediately, make any needed improvements, then re-sell the homes.

The total cost of using iBuying for home sellers is 13-15 percent of a home’s sale price, according to research by Collateral Analytics.

That compares to a 5-7 percent commission, plus the costs of any needed home repairs or preparation, for a seller working with a traditional real estate agent. In addition, iBuying sellers are freed from the uncertainty of selling their home.