The financial news that actually matters
Families with estates above roughly $14 million just gained more than $1 million in additional federal tax shelter. The basic exclusion amount for the federal estate-and-gift tax rose to $15,000,000 per person for calendar year 2026, up from $13,990,000 in 2025. The increase traces directly to Section 70106 of the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act,…
Millions of freelancers, gig workers, and casual online sellers who use platforms like Venmo, PayPal, and Etsy will see far fewer tax forms landing in their inboxes starting with the 2026 tax year. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed on July 4, 2025, as Public Law 119-21, retroactively restored the original Form 1099-K reporting…
Roughly 70 million Americans who depend on Social Security retirement checks face a 22 percent benefit cut starting in late 2032 unless Congress acts first. The program’s Board of Trustees released its 2026 annual report on June 9, confirming that the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund will be depleted by the fourth quarter of…
More than 444,131 renters who leased homes from Invitation Homes, the country’s largest single-family rental landlord, are receiving refund checks from the Federal Trade Commission totaling more than $47.2 million. The payments, distributed on March 11, 2026, cover mandatory fees that the FTC says were hidden from tenants between January 2021 and September 2024. According…
Millions of Americans age 65 and older now have access to an enhanced federal tax deduction worth up to $6,000 per person, or $12,000 for married couples filing jointly when both spouses qualify. But claiming the benefit requires a step that did not exist before: attaching a brand-new form called Schedule 1-A to Form 1040…
Homebuyers hoping for relief from borrowing costs above 6% will have to keep waiting. Federal Reserve officials, in their latest quarterly projections released on June 17, 2026, set a median year-end federal funds rate of 3.8%, a figure that sits above the current target range of 3.50% to 3.75%. That shift signals at least one…
U.S. employers announced 45,849 job cuts in June, a 53% drop from May’s 97,006 and the lowest monthly total since December 2025. The sharp pullback arrived as artificial intelligence held its position as the top cited reason for workforce reductions for the fourth straight month, raising a pointed question: does the cooldown signal genuine labor-market…
Cyclists who bought certain Shimano cranksets now face a hard deadline to file claims tied to a recall and enforcement action that has cost the company $11.5 million in civil penalties. The August 4 cutoff applies to owners of Ultegra and Dura-Ace Hollowtech road cranksets manufactured before July 2019, products that were sold individually and…
Investors holding U.S. equities face a stark valuation gap: the market’s price-to-earnings ratio sits roughly 60 percent above its century-long average, according to warnings from Jeremy Grantham, the co-founder of GMO. That premium, visible across multiple official and academic datasets, raises a direct question for anyone with retirement savings or a brokerage account: can corporate…
FedEx lowered its full-year profit forecast for a third consecutive quarter, citing persistent inflation and weakening package demand as twin forces squeezing margins across its operations. The repeated downgrades signal that cost pressures from fuel, labor, and purchased transportation have not eased, even as the volume of shipments moving through the company’s network has softened….