The financial news that actually matters
Veterans waiting on disability benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs are seeing faster decisions and fewer errors than at any point in the past two years. The agency reported that average completion time for a disability claim dropped to 80.7 days, down from 141.5 days, while 12-month claim-based accuracy reached 94.02 percent. Those changes,…
Federal student loan borrowers still enrolled in the SAVE plan face a hard deadline: servicers will begin issuing exit notices on July 1, 2026, giving each borrower 90 days to pick a different repayment option. Those who do not act will be automatically placed into Standard Repayment or a new Tiered Standard plan. With 26…
American homeowners paid a collective $396.8 billion in single-family property taxes last year, pushing the average annual bill to $4,427, roughly 3 percent higher than the prior year. That increase landed on top of already elevated housing costs, squeezing household budgets in regions where local governments depend most heavily on property-tax revenue to fund schools,…
Roughly 70 million Americans who depend on Social Security checks are absorbing higher grocery and housing costs right now, but the cost-of-living adjustment meant to offset those increases will not reach their bank accounts until January 2027. Independent forecasts place the 2027 COLA somewhere between 3.9% and 4.2%, a notable jump from the 2.8% increase…
American consumers paid more than $12 billion in overdraft and nonsufficient funds fees in 2025, a total that looks jarring next to the wave of fee cuts and eliminations at the largest U.S. banks. The gap between headline reforms and the actual dollars leaving checking accounts traces back to a shift in who collects the…
Workers across the American tech sector absorbed the sharpest round of job cuts the industry has seen in nearly two years during May, when employers announced 97,006 reductions nationwide. The tech sector alone accounted for 38,242 of those cuts, roughly 39 percent of the total, concentrating pain in an industry that had been among the…
Millions of Americans with forgotten brokerage accounts, old savings bonds, or inherited stock portfolios stand to lose real money under a system that lets state governments sell those assets and pocket the proceeds. Reps. Mike Lawler, a Republican representing New York’s 17th District, and Dave Liccardo introduced the bipartisan SAFER Act to stop states from…
American households now owe a record $18.8 trillion, and a growing share of that debt is going unpaid. The New York Federal Reserve’s Household Debt and Credit report for the first quarter found that 4.8% of all consumer debt sat in some stage of delinquency, the highest rate since 2020. The figure lands at a…
Workers saving for retirement in 2026 can now put away $7,500 in a Roth IRA, up from the prior cap, while those aged 50 and older qualify for an additional $1,100 catch-up contribution, bringing their annual ceiling to $8,600. The IRS locked in those figures through Notice 2025-67, published in Internal Revenue Bulletin 2025-49, citing…
Workers who lose employer-sponsored health insurance mid-year face a tight deadline and a costly default option. Federal rules give them 60 days to enroll in an Affordable Care Act Marketplace plan through a Special Enrollment Period, a window that starts the day job-based coverage ends. The alternative, COBRA continuation coverage, shifts the full premium cost…