From our president: The real money deal

Having a choice is great, but making a choice can be a bear, especially when the wrong decision can jolt your finances. When you research a mortgage, a credit card, or a college loan, for example, you need to know that the information you find is straightforward.

When the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau opened a year ago, things got a great deal easier for consumers. Here are a few ways the agency is helping us:

The CFPB starts with the belief that people deserve clear, honest information. Its "Know Before You Owe" project aims to present the true costs and risks of a variety of types of loans.

The agency has asked the public for its opinion of proposed versions of mortgage-disclosure forms, credit-card agreements, and most recently, student-loan information. Tens of thousands of consumers and industry reps have weighed in and are helping to shape the final forms.

It's not only the cost of college that interests the CFPB but also the value, so the agency is looking at questionable practices at for-profit colleges. They're the ones that run misleading and manipulative marketing campaigns on late-night TV and elsewhere.

The 15 largest publicly traded companies that own those colleges spend $13 billion a year wooing students, especially military men and women and their GI Bill and Armed Forces Tuition Assistance benefits.

But the colleges' graduation rates are depressingly low, and for those students who get a degree, the likelihood of landing a good job is smaller than it is for graduates of less expensive, better public colleges.

That's especially galling because $3.7 billion of taxpayer money in 2009 went to for-profit colleges in the form of military education benefits. The abuses have led to investigations by the Senate and the Government Accountability Office. Submit complaints about financial products at consumerfinance.gov.