The financial news that actually matters
A 62-year-old worker earning $120,000 can now put up to $35,750 into a 401(k) in 2026. That is roughly $4,250 more than the same worker could have contributed last year, and it reflects the largest single-year expansion of late-career retirement saving capacity in more than a decade. The jump comes from two changes landing at…
A baby born on the Fourth of July last year already has $1,000 waiting in a savings account she has never seen. So does every other child born in the United States since that date. The money is real, it is federally funded, and starting July 4, 2026, parents will finally be able to access…
For the first time in more than two years, the U.S. economy may have created fewer jobs in a single month than it takes to keep pace with population growth. Economists polled by Reuters and Bloomberg expect that employers added roughly 55,000 nonfarm jobs in April 2026, a steep decline from the 178,000 positions created…
Until now, a Medicare enrollee who wanted Wegovy had two options: pay roughly $1,350 a month out of pocket or go without. On July 1, 2026, a third option arrives. Under a new federal demonstration called the Medicare GLP-1 Bridge, eligible Part D beneficiaries will be able to fill prescriptions for covered weight-loss GLP-1 medications…
If you filed your 2025 federal tax return without direct deposit information and you’ve been waiting weeks for a refund check that never arrived, there is a reason: the check is not coming. Starting with the 2026 filing season, the IRS no longer mails paper refund checks to most individual taxpayers. Instead, filers without bank…
In late May 2026, Spirit Airlines flight 402 from Fort Lauderdale to San Juan flipped from “On Time” to “Canceled” on the departure board. The following account is drawn from passenger descriptions posted on social media and has not been independently verified: roughly 180 travelers at the gate reportedly received no rebooking, no vouchers, and…
A driver topping off a 50-gallon pickup truck in mid-February 2026 paid roughly $155 at the pump. That same fill-up now costs about $222, a difference of roughly $67, after the national average price of regular unleaded gasoline surged 30 cents in a single week to $4.45 a gallon as of the second week of…
Ray Dalio built Bridgewater Associates into the world’s largest hedge fund by studying how debt cycles break. Now the billionaire investor is turning that lens on a policy fight in his own backyard: a California ballot initiative that would impose a one-time 5% wealth tax on the state’s billionaires, with the first payments due in…
A family of four grilling burgers this Memorial Day weekend will spend roughly $6.70 for every pound of ground beef they toss on the grate. Driving to the store to buy it costs $4.43 a gallon. And the house they pull into afterward? If they bought it recently with a 30-year fixed mortgage, they’re likely…
Lenders filed foreclosure notices on 118,727 U.S. properties during the first quarter of 2026, according to ATTOM’s Q1 2026 Foreclosure Market Report. That is a 26% jump from the same period last year and a 6% increase over the final quarter of 2025, marking the highest quarterly total since pandemic-era protections started expiring. The numbers…