The financial news that actually matters
The deadline to file a claim in the Krispy Kreme data breach settlement is Saturday, June 21, and anyone who received a notification letter has only days left to act. The settlement offers up to $3,500 per person for documented out-of-pocket losses tied to the late 2024 cyberattack that knocked out the doughnut chain’s online…
A year ago, a buyer in suburban Virginia who asked for a home inspection risked losing the deal. This spring, that same buyer can request repairs, negotiate closing credits, and still have time to sleep on it. The shift is showing up in hard numbers: in April 2026, new listings across the Mid-Atlantic outpaced new…
Maria Gonzalez, a home health aide in San Antonio, pulled her credit report in April 2026 and found the same $4,200 emergency-room bill that had dragged her score below 600 two years earlier. A federal rule finalized in January 2025 was supposed to strip medical collections from credit reports nationwide. Months later, a Texas judge…
Buyers have not had this much room to maneuver since before the pandemic scrambled the housing market. The National Association of Realtors’ Housing Affordability Index has climbed for eight consecutive months through March 2026, the longest sustained improvement since mortgage rates began their sharp ascent in 2022. Active inventory hit 1.47 million homes in April,…
Through the first five months of 2026, the S&P 500 is sitting on a healthy gain. But the cap-weighted index has pulled well ahead of its equal-weight counterpart, a clear sign that the advance is being driven by the very largest names in the roster. The Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF (ticker RSP), which…
When a three-bedroom ranch in a growing Sun Belt suburb sat on the market for weeks this spring without a single offer, the listing agent suggested something that would have been unthinkable two years earlier: the seller should pay to lower the buyer’s mortgage rate. The seller agreed, funding a temporary rate buydown that shaved…
Fill up your tank this summer and you are, in a roundabout way, helping to set the size of next year’s Social Security raise. Federal inflation data through April 2026 points to a 3.9 percent cost-of-living adjustment for January 2027, which would add roughly $81 a month to the average retired-worker benefit and mark the…
On June 9, 2026, federal bank examiners will lose one of their most controversial tools: the ability to pressure banks into closing your account because your politics, religion, or legal business activities make someone uncomfortable. A joint final rule from the FDIC and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, published in the Federal…
American homeowners are collectively sitting on roughly $35 trillion in home equity, the largest stockpile ever recorded in Federal Reserve data. But for millions of those households, that wealth might as well be sealed behind a glass wall: visible, substantial, and painfully expensive to touch. The problem is the gap between what homeowners already pay…
A parent who took out $30,000 in federal PLUS loans to cover a child’s tuition can, right now, consolidate that debt into a Direct Consolidation Loan and enroll in Income-Contingent Repayment, dropping monthly payments to as little as $50. That door closes permanently on July 1, 2026. Under a final rule the Department of Education…