The financial news that actually matters
A batch of refund payments tied to one of the food-delivery industry’s biggest enforcement cases is going out right now, and the people owed money do not have to lift a finger to claim it. The Federal Trade Commission has started sending more than $23.8 million to over 640,000 people harmed by Grubhub, split between…
Medicare has locked in a second round of negotiated prices, and this batch reaches deeper into the medicine cabinets of older Americans than the first did. Federal officials reached agreement with drugmakers on new prices for 15 widely used medicines, headlined by the semaglutide family sold as Ozempic and Wegovy. The reductions run from 38…
For retirees who depend on a Social Security check to cover rent and groceries, a letter from the agency claiming it paid too much has become far more dangerous than it was two years ago. Social Security can now recover an overpayment by withholding half of a person’s monthly benefit by default, a sharp reversal…
Millions of divorced older Americans quietly leave money on the table because they assume a marriage that ended years ago has nothing to do with their retirement income. Social Security says otherwise. A person who was married for at least a decade and never remarried can draw a monthly check built entirely on a former…
More than four million American children have been signed up for a new type of federally backed savings account created under last year’s sweeping tax law, according to the Internal Revenue Service. Yet the agency’s own tally shows only about one in four of those children is actually in line for the $1,000 the federal…
Heating and cooling a home can swallow a large share of a fixed monthly income, and the bills arrive whether or not the money is there. A federal program exists to help low-income households, including many older adults, cover part of those energy costs. It reaches residents only through their own state, however, and only…
A change to the food-assistance program many older Americans rely on is now taking effect, and it reaches a group that was previously shielded from its toughest rule. Adults in their late fifties and early sixties, once exempt from federal work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, are being pulled into them. The result…
Older homeowners often try to simplify their estate by adding an adult child to the deed of the family home. The logic seems sound: put the child on the title now, and the house should pass smoothly and avoid probate later. In practice, that single change can create a tax-filing obligation, hand a share of…
A will can name every heir and spell out exactly who should inherit, and a single outdated form filed years earlier can quietly override the entire document. Retirement accounts, life insurance policies, and many bank and brokerage accounts pass by beneficiary designation, not by will. Whoever is written on that form collects the money, even…
A home bought decades ago for a modest sum can be worth many times that today, and selling it turns years of paper appreciation into a real capital gain. For most other investments, that gain would be fully taxable. The tax code carves out a large exception for a main home, letting a qualifying seller…