Back in 1998 the Bureau for At-Risk Youth made some pencils to inspire kids to stay clean. Not too many weeks into the campaign, a 10 year old at Ticonderoga (yep, the school bearing the same name as the pencil maker) Elementary discovered that as the pencils were actually put through the rounds of use, an entirely different message was being sent to the minds of the unsuspecting children donning the lead infused advertising campaign, and it was retooled immediately. As it happens of course, the pencils now have cult status among English-speaking wayward souls around the world.
In the vein of would-be-do-gooders seeking to clean up the world with nary a thought as to how the pencil will look when it’s actually put into use, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rolled out TRID this week. This much anticipated set of rules and procedures retiring the Good Faith Estimate and the Truth in Lending Disclosure has been coming down the pike for over two years now. It is formally called The Truth-in-Lending/Real Estate Procedures Integrated Disclosure Rule (TRID is in there somewhere), and it has Realtors, lenders, title companies, and buyers and sellers of real estate across the country holding their collective breath to see how things will shake out. Despite having published the 27 page “Know Before You Owe” brochures, the CFPB is discovering that there is still a lot of vagaries to be sorted out and we are getting memos and bulletins constantly.
HOWEVER, the new docs are a giant step in the right direction, and I think that it will be great for the lending community as a whole, aiding transparency to outdated and misleading forms. I embrace the changes and am attempting to find the humor in the moronic nuances that, like the pencils, are turning out send a different message than what they were constructed to convey. Laughter is after all, the best medicine.
