Escalate a bank, lender, or servicer with a complaint regulators act on

  1. Pin down the single issue and the exact fix you want
    20 min

    This step produces the one-sentence statement of the dispute — the account, the error, and the fix you will demand — that every later document quotes. What makes it tricky is that a real dispute rarely has a single wrong thing attached to it, and a complaint that names two issues gets routed back for editing. The discipline here is choosing one.

    • Pick the product and the account: the mortgage, student loan, auto loan, or checking account at issue, and write down the account number.
    • Name the error in one clause: a fee charged, a payment applied to the wrong date, a balance that will not clear, a payment reported late after it was made.
    • State the fix as a measurable remedy: a refund in dollars, a deleted or corrected credit item, a balance adjustment, interest reversed.
    • Write it as one sentence: “On account [number], [error] happened, and I want [fix].”
    • Test the sentence: if it names two errors or two fixes, split the file — one issue per complaint, in the order of the dollar harm.