Consumer Protection Week 2025: How to protect your finances, data and sanity

Expert tips on everything from shopping for credit cards to knowing your rights as an airline passenger

CLEVELAND — As consumers, we have a lot of plates to keep spinning: Making sure our information is safe. Finding a better credit card. Sorting out our medical bills. Buying electronics that last.

In recognition of National Consumer Protection Week 2025, which starts March 2, PIRG has created consumer protection tips and tools to help Americans address a wide range of common issues. 

“Our world is getting more difficult in some ways, and easier in others,” said Teresa Murray, Consumer Watchdog Director for U.S. PIRG Education Fund. “Recent natural disasters have left people scrambling to replace important documents in their homes. And data breaches, robocalls and artificial intelligence pose new threats.

“Meanwhile, every month, federal and state governments approve some laws and rules, and squash others that we need to keep track of. Then, we have new technology and tools to make some parts of our lives better,” Murray said.

U.S. PIRG Education Fund and its partner PIRG have more than 50 years of combined experience as consumer advocates. The groups offer dozens of guides and step-by-step tools to help make life a little easier for American consumers. This consumer week, we will focus on several of 2025’s most pressing issues:

New guide: How to store important documents in the cloud safely

By R.J. Cross, Director, Consumer Privacy Program

Nearly 1 in 5 Americans has at some point had to evacuate their homes during a severe weather event, according to an October 2024 YouGov poll. Being prepared for such a natural disaster includes not only having prescriptions and pet supplies in your emergency “go bag.” You also want to have a plan for your important paperwork. U.S. PIRG Education Fund’s new consumer guide, “The best way to store important documents before disaster hits,” will help you disaster-proof your documents.  

Read the full news release.

‘The best laptops of 2025 are repairable’ guide helps you choose fixable devices

By Lucas Gutterman, Director, Designed to Last Campaign 

Consumers pay good money for their laptops, and they deserve ones that can be fixed if they break, so U.S. PIRG Education Fund is releasing an updated “The best laptops of 2025 are repairable” guide. The guide calculates a grade based on repairability scores for the most popular laptop brands on the market. Companies that design their devices to last receive a good grade, while those “failing the fix” receive poor grades.

Read the full news release.

New guide: Freeze your credit report from all three bureaus in half an hour online

By Stanton Cope, Consumer Watchdog Associate

Congress in 2018 approved allowing consumers to freeze their credit files at no charge. Yet it’s estimated that only about 10% of consumers have done so. Some of this stems from good intention followed by procrastination. 

It’s become easier to perform this crucial finance-protecting task online (and you can still do it by phone in about 20 minutes total for all three national credit bureaus). We provide a new guide, “Freezing your credit files online in 30 minutes: Step-by-step guide with screenshots” from a staffer who had never frozen his files before. Freezing online will be a breeze for consumers who follow along with our screenshots and pro tips.

Read the full news release.

Other helpful guides:
How to file a freeze for minors
Tips to avoid robocalls, robotexts and scams
What to do if your information is compromised in a data breach

How to lower your medical bills

By Patricia Kelmar, Senior Director, Health Care Campaigns

Many families plan for expected expenses, but medical bills can throw off even the most carefully crafted budget. When people know their rights and protections, they can better fight erroneous medical bills, appeal insurance company denials of coverage and budget better by finding out prices in advance. 

Our guides show you how to get a good faith estimate, appeal an insurance denial, understand a medical bill, negotiate prices and make sure your credit report doesn’t include paid medical bills. For tips on fighting medical bills, check out our six-part guide: “Medical Bills: Everything you need to know about your rights.”

Read the full news release.

Spotlighting the CFPB’s first-of-its-kind credit card shopping tool  

By Mike Litt, Director, Consumer Campaign

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) offers the Explore Credit Cards comparison tool on its website. The tool uses unbiased, public data collected by the CFPB from all major credit card companies and some smaller companies that have voluntarily provided it. U.S. PIRG Education Fund discusses the importance and utility of this tool and explains how to use it.

Read the full news release.

Planning to fly in 2025? A lot has changed since last year

By Teresa Murray, Consumer Watchdog Director

If you generally fly only during spring break or the summertime, you can look forward to several new airline passenger protections in 2025 that didn’t exist a year ago. And you’re likely to need some of these new protections this year: Passenger volume is expected to reach 5.2 billion in 2025, a 6.7% increase compared with 2024 and the first time that the number of passengers will exceed the 5 billion mark, according to the International Air Transport Association.

Travelers can walk through what rights they have now, and how to best handle disruptions, in U.S. PIRG Education Fund’s helpful guide, “Airline travel tips you shouldn’t fly without,” available at FlightTips.org.

Read the full news release.