Timeline
Here’s a full timeline of how the Know Before You Owe: Mortgages project has developed. It’s a look back at our effort to make mortgage disclosures simpler and more effective, with the input of the people who will actually use them.
You can also return to the main page to view an interactive timeline.
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act is signed into law.
The new law requires the CFPB to combine the Truth in Lending and Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act disclosures.
The Treasury Department hosts a mortgage disclosure symposium.
The event brings together consumer advocates, industry, marketers, and more to discuss CFPB implementation of the combined disclosures.
Design begins.
Starting with the legal requirements and the consumer in mind, we begin sketching prototype forms for testing.
During this process, the team discussed preliminary issues and ideas about mortgage disclosures. This session set the context for the disclosures and was a starting point for their development. The team continued to develop these issues and ideas over more than a year during the development process.
Know Before You Owe opens online.
We post the first two prototype loan estimates. We ask consumers and industry to examine them and tell us what works and what doesn’t. We repeated this process for several future rounds. Over the course of the next ten months, people submitted more than 27,000 comments.
Testing begins in Baltimore.
We sit down with consumers, lenders, and brokers to examine the first set of loan estimate prototypes to test two different graphic design approaches.
Disclosures tested:
Los Angeles, CA
Consumers and industry participants work with prototypes with lump sum closing costs and prototypes with itemized closing costs.
Disclosures tested:
Chicago, IL
Again, we ask testing participants to work with prototypes with lump sum closing costs and itemized closing costs.
Disclosures tested:
Springfield, MA
Another round of closing cost tests, as we present participants with one disclosure that has the two-column design from previous rounds and another that uses a new graphic presentations of the costs.
Disclosures tested:
Albuquerque, NM
In this round, we present closing costs in the itemized format, and work on the table that shows how payments change over time.
Disclosures tested:
Des Moines, IA
We begin testing closing disclosures. Both designs include HUD-1-style numbering for closing details, but two different ways of presenting other costs and Truth in Lending information.
Disclosures tested:
Birmingham, AL
One form continues to use the HUD-1 style numbered closing cost details; the other is formatted more like the Loan Estimate, carrying over the Cash to Close table and no line numbers.
Disclosures tested:
Philadelphia, PA
In this round , we settle on prototypes that are formatted like the Loan Estimate, but one includes line numbers and the other doesn’t. We also begin testing the Loan Estimate with the Closing Disclosure.
Disclosures tested:
Prototype A
Prototype B
Prototype C
Austin, TX
Participants review one Loan Estimate and one Closing Disclosure (with line numbers) to see how well they work together.
Disclosures tested:
We convene a small business review panel.
A panel of representatives from the CFPB, the Small Business Administration (SBA), and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) considers the potential impact of the proposals under consideration on small businesses that will provide the mortgage disclosures.
We meet with small businesses.
The panel meets with small businesses and asked for their feedback on the impacts of various proposals the CFPB is considering. This feedback is summarized in the panel’s report.
(Note: Link to large PDF file.)
Back to Baltimore!
We conduct one final round of testing to confirm that some modifications from the last round work for consumers.
Disclosures tested:
Prototype A
Prototype B
Prototype C
Proposal of the new rule.
The CFPB releases a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. The notice proposes a new rule to implement the combined mortgage disclosures and requests your comments on the proposal.
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