The financial news that actually matters
Medicare Advantage has grown into one of the most popular ways for older Americans to get their health coverage, pulled in by low or even zero monthly premiums and extra benefits such as dental, vision, or hearing care that Original Medicare leaves out. Those advantages arrive with a structural catch that many enrollees never notice…
Most people assume that once they are on Medicare, there is a limit to how much a bad year of health can cost them. On a private or employer health plan, that assumption is usually correct, because those plans include an annual ceiling on out-of-pocket spending. Original Medicare works differently, and the difference is easy…
One of the most expensive assumptions in retirement is that Medicare will pay for a nursing home. Many older Americans carry that belief for years, only to discover the truth at the worst possible moment, when a parent or spouse needs round-the-clock help and the bills start arriving. Original Medicare was never built to cover…
In households where one partner earned most or all of the income, the other often assumes retirement will leave them with little Social Security of their own. That assumption sells the program short. Social Security’s spousal benefit is built for exactly this situation, paying a husband or wife up to half of the higher earner’s…
When a Social Security recipient dies, surviving family members often assume the program will help cover the immediate expenses that follow. What Social Security actually offers as a one-time death benefit is a single payment of $255 — an amount that has not changed in roughly seventy years. For a generation that has watched the…
For many older Americans, a marriage that ended years, or even decades, ago still holds a piece of financial value that quietly goes unclaimed. Social Security allows a divorced person to draw a monthly benefit built on a former spouse’s earnings record, and choosing to do so takes nothing away from that former spouse. The…
Payment apps have become a routine way to split a restaurant bill, send money to a grandchild, or collect a refund, and it is easy to let a balance sit in one for weeks or even months. The apps look and feel like bank accounts, complete with a running balance, transfers, and a debit card….
The national totals on elder fraud are staggering, but the figure that lands hardest is the one measured one household at a time. Behind the billion-dollar headlines are individual retirees who did not lose pocket change. Many lost a meaningful slice of everything they had set aside, and a large group lost virtually all of…
One of the more audacious online-influence fraud cases in recent memory has reached its conclusion with a lengthy prison term and an enormous forfeiture order. The defendant spent years cultivating a devoted internet following, then converted that loyalty into a vehicle for fraud that ultimately cost his supporters more than a billion dollars. Federal prosecutors…
When the Social Security Administration pays a beneficiary more than the rules allow, it treats the surplus as a debt to be collected, even when the error was the agency’s own. For years the government recovered those overpayments gently, shaving a small slice off each monthly check. That approach has since hardened, and the current…