The financial news that actually matters
If you are one of the roughly 8 million people still enrolled in the now-blocked SAVE repayment plan, your loan servicer is about to send you a notice that starts a 90-day countdown. Miss it, and the U.S. Department of Education will place you into a fixed-payment plan that could cost you thousands of dollars…
Trump wants to suspend the 18.4-cent federal gas tax – but the math shows families would save just $35 over five months Fill up a midsize sedan once a week from June through October, and President Donald Trump’s proposed federal gas tax holiday would save your household about $35. Not per month. Total. That figure…
On May 5, Freshworks Inc. filed a restructuring plan with the Securities and Exchange Commission that contained a phrase almost no public company would have put in a regulated disclosure two years ago. The San Mateo-based software maker said it would “increase leverage of AI and automation across the business,” directly linking a round of…
In 28 days, federal bank examiners will lose one of the most controversial tools in their supervisory arsenal. Starting June 9, 2026, examiners at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency will be barred from pressuring banks to close customer accounts, deny services, or sever banking relationships based…
The average American who financed a new car in the first quarter of 2026 committed to a monthly payment of $773. The average amount financed hit a record $43,899. And nearly one in four of those buyers signed a loan lasting 84 months or longer. That last figure, 22.9% of all financed new-car deals, comes…
After a 2.8 percent cost-of-living adjustment took effect in January 2026, the average retired-worker Social Security check rose to roughly $2,031 a month. That raise already feels small to millions of beneficiaries watching gas station price boards climb past $4 a gallon in much of the country. Now, the same fuel costs eating into their…
Not long ago, more than 1.2 million Americans were stuck in a single line, waiting for the Social Security Administration to decide whether their disabilities qualified them for benefits. It was the largest initial-claims backlog in the agency’s history, and behind every case number was a person with a degenerative illness, a spinal injury, or…
To illustrate the lock-in dilemma, consider a hypothetical but representative scenario: a homeowner in suburban Denver who bought a three-bedroom house in 2021 and locked in a 2.875% mortgage rate. Since then, the home’s estimated value has climbed by more than $120,000. On paper, she is wealthier than she has ever been. In practice, she…
The number kept climbing through the spring. By mid-June 2026, roughly 92,000 tech workers in the United States had lost their jobs, according to Layoffs.fyi, the startup and tech layoff tracker that has become a default scoreboard for the industry’s workforce contractions. The figure alone would be striking. What sets this year apart is the…
A shopper filling the same cart every week could be forgiven for wondering whether the government’s grocery inflation number was pulled from a different universe. A dozen eggs averaged about $3.20 in March 2026, based on BLS average retail price data published in the Consumer Price Index report, down 44.7% from the record highs of…