Pension Loans: The New 'Payday-Type' Loan Duping Seniors Into Debt With Hidden Usurious Interest; Deal Disguised As A 'Signing Away Of Retirement Benefits;' Loan Sharks' Response: 'We Don't Make Loans ... We Make Advances!'

The New York Times reports:

• To retirees, the offers can sound like the answer to every money worry: convert tomorrow’s pension checks into today’s hard cash.
  
  But these offers, known as pension advances, are having devastating financial consequences for a growing number of older Americans, threatening their retirement savings and plunging them further into debt. The advances, federal and state authorities say, are not advances at all, but carefully disguised loans that require borrowers to sign over all or part of their monthly pension checks. They carry interest rates that are often many times higher than those on credit cards.
  
  In lean economic times, people with public pensions — military veterans, teachers, firefighters, police officers and others — are being courted particularly aggressively by pension-advance companies, which operate largely outside of state and federal banking regulations, but are now drawing scrutiny from Congress and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

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• A review by The New York Times of more than two dozen contracts for pension-based loans found that after factoring in various fees, the effective interest rates ranged from 27 percent to 106 percent — information not disclosed in the ads or in the contracts themselves. Furthermore, to qualify for one of the loans, borrowers are sometimes required to take out a life insurance policy that names the lender as the sole beneficiary.
  
  LumpSum Pension Advance and Pension Funding did not return calls and e-mails for comment.
  
  While it is difficult to say precisely how many financially struggling people have taken out pension loans, legal aid offices in Arizona, California, Florida and New York say they have recently encountered a surge in complaints from retirees who have run into trouble with the loans.
  
  Ronald E. Govan, a Marine Corps veteran in Snellville, Ga., paid an interest rate of more than 36 percent on a pension-based loan. He said he was enraged that veterans were being targeted by the firm, Pensions, Annuities & Settlements, which did not return calls for comment.
  
  “I served for this country,” said Mr. Govan, a Vietnam veteran, “and this is what I get in return.”
  
  The allure of borrowing against pensions underscores an abrupt reversal in the financial fortunes of many retirees in recent years, as well as the efforts by a number of financial firms, including payday lenders and debt collectors, to market directly to them.

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• “The cost of these pension transactions can be astronomically high,” said Stuart Rossman, a lawyer with the National Consumer Law Center, an advocacy group that works on issues of economic justice for low-income people. “But there is profit to be made on older Americans’ financial pain.”
  
  The oldest members of the baby boom generation became eligible for Social Security during the recent housing bust and recession, and many nearing retirement age watched their investments plummet in value. Some are now sliding deep into debt to make ends meet.
  
  The pitches for pension loans emphasize how difficult it can be for retirees with scant savings and checkered credit histories to borrow money, especially because banks typically do not count pension income when considering loan applications.

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• Financial products like pension advances, which promise quick cash, appear especially enticing because their long-term costs are largely hidden from the borrowers.
  
  Federal and state regulators are spotting fresh examples of abuse, and both the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Senate’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions are examining these loans, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
  
  Though the firms are not directly regulated by states, officials from the California Department of Corporations, the state’s top financial services regulator, filed a desist-and-refrain order against a pension-advance firm in 2011 for failing to disclose critical information to investors.
  
  That firm has since filed for bankruptcy, but a department spokesman said it remained watchful of pension-advance products.

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• Borrowing against pensions can help some retirees, elder-care lawyers say. But, like payday loans, which are commonly aimed at lower-income borrowers, pension loans can turn ruinous for people who are already financially vulnerable, because of the loans’ high costs.

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• Lawyers for service members argue that pension lending flouts federal laws that restrict how military pensions can be used. [...] Pitches to military members must sidestep a federal law that prevents veterans from automatically turning over pension payments to third parties.
  
  Pension-advance firms encourage veterans to establish separate bank accounts controlled by the firms where pension payments are deposited first and then sent to the lenders. Lawyers for retirees have challenged the pension-advance firms in courts across the United States, claiming that they illegally seize military members’ pensions and violate state limits on interest rates.
  
  To circumvent state usury laws that cap loan rates, some pension advance firms insist their products are advances, not loans, according to the firms’ Web sites and federal and state lawsuits. On its Web site, Pension Funding asks, “Is this a loan against my pension?” The answer, it says, is no. “It is an advance, not a loan,” the site says.

For more, see Loans Borrowed Against Pensions Squeeze Retirees.