The financial news that actually matters
A year ago, filling up a midsize sedan cost about $50. Today, that same tank runs closer to $65, and for families with two cars and a long commute, the difference is eating into grocery budgets, vacation plans, and monthly savings. Gasoline prices have climbed 28.4% over the past 12 months, overall inflation has reached…
When IBM announced in 2023 that it would pause hiring for roughly 7,800 roles it believed AI could eventually handle, the move was treated as a bellwether. Dropbox, Chegg, and Duolingo followed with their own AI-linked cuts. The implicit promise was straightforward: fewer workers plus smarter software equals better results. Three years later, the data…
For nearly one in four Americans who financed a new car in early 2026, the payoff date is sometime in 2033. Loans stretching 84 months or longer accounted for 22.9% of all financed new-vehicle purchases in the first quarter, according to preliminary data from Edmunds, the automotive research firm. That is roughly double the share…
Consumer sentiment sits at an all-time low of 48.2 — the worst reading in 74 years — and today’s CPI report validated every reason consumers gave for feeling squeezed Americans have not felt this pessimistic about the economy since the University of Michigan first started polling them in 1952. The university’s preliminary Index of Consumer…
Fill up the tank, buy ground beef for dinner, pay the rent. Those three transactions, repeated millions of times a day across the country, are quietly draining American households of nearly every dollar of wage growth they have earned in the past year. As of March 2026, families are setting aside just 3.6 cents of…
Darnell Hughes used to fill his gas tank twice a week so he could make it to both his warehouse shifts in Memphis. Now he fills up once and skips the weekend job. “It is not that I paid anything off,” he said. “I just stopped driving.” Hughes’s tradeoff sits at the center of a…
Social Security sends checks to roughly 68 million Americans each month, but the gap between what the program can pay and what most retirees actually receive is enormous. For 2026, the maximum monthly benefit for a worker who delayed claiming until age 70 tops $5,000. The average retired worker, meanwhile, collects $2,071. That difference is…
Starting July 1, about 7.5 million federal student loan borrowers enrolled in the SAVE repayment plan will begin receiving letters from their loan servicers with a blunt message: the plan they signed up for no longer exists, and they have 90 days to choose a replacement. Anyone who doesn’t respond will be automatically placed on…
A taxpayer who paid a $2,400 failure-to-file penalty in August 2024 has until roughly August 2026 to claim a refund. But someone who paid a similar penalty in June 2024 faces a deadline that lands in mid-July 2026, barely two months from now. And once that window closes, the IRS keeps the money for good,…
Two cents off a gallon of gas is not the relief it sounds like. The national average price slipped to $4.50 this week, down from $4.52, according to the Energy Information Administration’s weekly retail survey. But the federal government’s latest inflation report paints a far harsher picture: gasoline prices have climbed 28.4% over the past…