The financial news that actually matters
Put $10,000 into a Series EE savings bond right now and the government will pay you 2.40% a year, fixed for life. Hold that same bond for 20 years and the government promises it will be worth $20,000, no matter what. Those two numbers do not add up on their own, and the gap between…
Every January, criminals race to file fraudulent tax returns before real taxpayers do. Their weapon is stolen personal data, often purchased in bulk from dark-web marketplaces that sell Social Security numbers alongside names, dates of birth, and W-2 details. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has documented billions of dollars in fraudulent refunds flowing…
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4, 2025, expanded SNAP work requirements to cover adults up to age 64 and narrowed the definition of who qualifies as a caregiver. As of June 2026, states are still rolling out enforcement for the newly covered age group, and many recipients between 55…
A parent who borrowed $40,000 in federal PLUS loans to help cover a child’s college tuition is about to face a permanent reduction in repayment options, unless they act within the next 31 days. After June 30, 2025, any new Direct Consolidation Loan that includes Parent PLUS debt will be locked out of every income-driven…
A 72-year-old single retiree living on $60,000 a year in Social Security and pension income stands to subtract an extra $6,000 from her taxable income on her 2025 federal return, a break that could save her more than $1,300 in taxes. A couple in their late 60s pulling in $200,000 from IRAs and investments will…
If you filed your federal tax return through the IRS Direct File tool last year, that option is gone. The IRS has shut down Direct File for the 2026 filing season, pulling the plug on the only government-built, no-cost electronic filing channel that let people prepare and submit returns without touching commercial software. The move…
For the vast majority of American taxpayers, an IRS audit is something that happens to other people. If you earned less than $200,000 and filed a straightforward return, your odds of being examined were roughly 1 in 1,000, according to the IRS’s fiscal year 2023 Data Book, Table 17, the most recent complete edition available…
Until last summer, a married couple worth $30 million was staring at a potential federal estate-tax bill that could have topped $6 million. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act had temporarily doubled the estate-and-gift-tax exemption, but that doubling was set to expire on January 1, 2026, snapping the per-person shield back to roughly $7…
A retiree who turned 73 last year and holds $500,000 in a traditional IRA owes the IRS a required minimum distribution of roughly $18,868, calculated using the Uniform Lifetime Table published in IRS Publication 590-B. If that money does not leave the account by December 31, the IRS will impose a 25 percent excise tax…
For seven years, a homeowner in Bergen County, New Jersey, paying $15,000 in annual property taxes could only write off $10,000 of that bill on a federal return. The other $5,000 simply vanished into the tax code. That changed when President Trump signed the One, Big, Beautiful Bill into law. Starting with the 2025 tax…