The financial news that actually matters
Roughly 7.5 million federal student loan borrowers are about to face a decision that could reshape their monthly budgets for years. The U.S. Department of Education has declared the SAVE repayment plan unlawful and is winding it down. Starting July 1, 2026, loan servicers will begin notifying SAVE enrollees that they must choose a replacement…
If you have a high-yield savings account at Capital One, Synchrony, or Marcus by Goldman Sachs, your rate likely dropped in the final days of May 2026, and your bank almost certainly didn’t send you a heads-up. Capital One’s 360 Performance Savings fell to 4.05% APY from 4.15% as of May 30, 2026, according to…
A $6,600 credit card balance is roughly what the average American household carries in revolving debt, according to TransUnion’s quarterly credit industry data. At today’s rates, that balance is generating about $1,462 a year in interest charges, enough to cover three months of groceries for a typical family, and every dollar of it goes toward…
A week ago, filling a 15-gallon tank with regular gasoline cost about $61.65 at the national average. Today it costs roughly $66.90. The national average price of regular gasoline jumped 35 cents to $4.46 per gallon for the week ending May 23, 2026, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That is the steepest single-week…
A round trip between Fort Lauderdale and Detroit used to cost as little as $78 on Spirit Airlines. Today, the cheapest nonstop on that route rarely dips below $140. That is not an outlier. Across dozens of city pairs where Spirit was often the lowest-priced carrier, fares have climbed roughly 14% since the airline stopped…
The spring homebuying window just got more expensive. After drifting down to 6.30% in mid-April, according to Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey, the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate reversed course and climbed to 6.39% by the second week of May, according to Mortgage News Daily. The catalyst was not domestic: it was a military…
Millions of taxpayers filed their 2025 returns this spring expecting a refund check in the mail. It is not coming. Not automatically, anyway. Starting with the 2026 filing season, the IRS no longer mails paper refund checks by default. If your return posted without direct deposit information, the agency processes it, calculates what you are…
A couple hunting for a three-bedroom in the Dallas suburbs this spring will scroll through roughly 30% more active listings than they would have found a year ago, according to metro-level tracking from Realtor.com. Phoenix looks similar. Nationally, the number of homes sitting on the market has climbed about 20% from the trough recorded in…
Married couples filing jointly in 2026 will keep $32,200 of their income completely free of federal tax, up $2,200 from the 2025 standard deduction of $30,000. That bump exists because the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law in the summer of 2025, made the higher deduction levels from the 2017 tax overhaul permanent….
The first batch of May Social Security deposits hits bank accounts on Wednesday, May 13, 2026, starting a three-week payout cycle that will reach roughly 74 million Americans. Every payment this month reflects the 2.8 percent cost-of-living adjustment that kicked in back in January, a bump that added an average of about $56 per month…