The financial news that actually matters
About 3.7 million people are expected to fly over the Memorial Day holiday weekend, according to Airlines for America, the industry trade group that tracks passenger volume around peak travel periods. If you are one of them and your flight gets canceled, you will not have to beg for your money back. A federal rule…
A retired couple collecting a combined $4,200 a month from Social Security might assume the survivor will be fine financially. But the math tells a different story. Say he receives $2,600 based on his earnings record and she receives $1,600 based on hers. When he dies, her $1,600 check doesn’t continue alongside his. The Social…
A borrower with a 750 credit score can lock in a 30-year fixed mortgage near 6.5 percent. Knock 100 points off that score and the same lender may quote closer to 7.8 percent, according to loan-level price adjustment matrices published by Fannie Mae. On a $350,000 loan, the gap works out to roughly $300 more…
Order an $80 dinner in Chicago, and the final credit card charge might hit $104 after tax and a 20 percent tip. The bank that issued the card collects an interchange fee on every dollar of that total, including the portion headed to the city treasury and the portion headed to the server. Illinois lawmakers…
Voice-cloning scams are not new, but the barrier to launching one has nearly vanished. In early 2026, security researchers demonstrated that a freely available cloning tool could replicate a speaker’s voice from a three-second audio sample with enough fidelity to fool family members on a phone call. That finding puts a concrete number on a…
For 15 straight years, Medicare Advantage grew without interruption. More enrollees signed up, more insurers entered the market, and more plans advertised $0 monthly premiums bundled with dental, vision, and hearing benefits that traditional Medicare does not cover. That unbroken streak is now over. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced that the average…
You’re loading the car for a long weekend on the road when your phone buzzes: a short, official-looking text about a $4.15 unpaid toll, with a link to pay before late fees pile up. It feels routine. It is not. That message is a scam, and it is flooding phones across the country right now,…
The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.51% in the Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey for the week ending May 22, 2026, its highest reading since late August 2025. That number, on its own, is not the story. The story is that it barely differs from the reading in January, or February, or March. For most…
When Maria Gonzalez, a 72-year-old widow in Portland, Oregon, sat down with her estate attorney in early 2025, the conversation centered on a single fear: that the federal estate tax exemption was about to be cut nearly in half, potentially exposing her $10 million estate to a tax bill her heirs could not afford without…
Amazon made canceling Prime so frustrating that its own employees had a name for the process: “Iliad,” after Homer’s epic about a war that ground on for ten years. The Federal Trade Commission agreed it was a problem, and the agency’s $2.5 billion settlement with Amazon is now paying out. If you tried to cancel…