We Need Holly Petraeus
A quick note about Holly Petraeus …
(Photo credit: Secretary of Defense)
We like to claim in the United States that we honor veterans and their families, but that hasn’t stopped the financial services sector from preying on them. The abuses are numerous, and putting a stop to them can often seem less like effective law enforcement and more like a not-fun game of whack-a-mole.
A few examples from recent years:
- First Command Financial Planning was fined $12 million for pitching veterans on an investment with a load – or upfront charge – of a staggering 50 percent. (A normal load is between one and five percent)
- Insurance agents and companies were outed by Diane Henriques of The New York Times for charging military personnel excessively high fees for low paying and unneeded life insurance plans for soldiers, who already have access to low cost policies via the military.
- Citibank, Ally Financial, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo agreed to pay $25 billion to settle charges by the federal government that they had illegally foreclosed on homes belonging to deployed soldiers.
As if all this were not enough, returning veterans are also targeted (pun intended!) by the for profit higher education sector, who are very eager to sign up students who come with G.I. Bill benefits, but are less than eager to share the fact that many employers look down on degrees from such institutions.
Holly Petraeus, who comes from a military family, understands intuitively that the unscrupulous and greedy – from individual life insurance agents to multi-national banks — know that all-too-many military personnel are young, living far away from family and are less than financially savvy. She was the head of the Better Business Bureau’s outreach to military families in the aughts before being appointed by Elizabeth Warren in 2011 to head up the at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s service members affairs division. At the CFPB, she’s been particularly active in helping military families navigate housing issues – housing issues often caused by the high interest rate mortgages that are marketed to those who serve our country.
Let’s hope Holly Petraeus’ work does not get subsumed in the sex scandal enveloping her husband, now former Central Intelligence Agency head Gen. David Petraeus. We need her services much too much to let her become best known as just one more wife done wrong by a less than faithful spouse.
About Helaine Olen
I am the voice of The Bills, a column about the intersection of money and life, at Slate. At Inc., I contribute to the Spread the Wealth personal finance column. My work on politics, economics, workplace culture and women’s issues has been published in numerous other print and on-line publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Salon, Pacific Standard, and The Los Angeles Times, where I wrote and edited the popular “Money Makeover” feature.
I'm the author of the critically acclaimed book Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry, and The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn’t Have to be so Complicated, which I co-wrote with Harold Pollack.
What else? I’m a passionate bibliophile, a fan of 1970s pop music and a lover of rummage sales. I live in New York City.
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