The financial news that actually matters
Medicare eligibility arrives with a deadline that does not announce itself. For most people the sign-up window opens three months before the 65th birthday and closes three months after, and missing it without a valid reason carries a price that never goes away. The Part B late-enrollment penalty adds 10 percent to the monthly premium…
The three largest names in Medicare Advantage are entering the 2027 plan year by subtracting rather than adding. UnitedHealth, Humana, and CVS Health’s Aetna unit have each signaled that they will drop coverage options and abandon unprofitable counties, a retreat that lands just a year after roughly 2.6 million enrollees already watched a plan disappear….
For decades, the money in a typical workplace retirement plan went into a short, plain menu: stock funds, bond funds, and a target-date option that mixed the two. A federal directive is now pushing to widen that menu to include the kind of investments once reserved for pensions and the wealthy, from private equity funds…
Retirement savers spend decades watching traditional IRAs and 401(k) accounts grow untaxed, but the government eventually sets a date when that arrangement ends. For most current retirees, the clock starts the year they turn 73, the age at which federal law requires them to begin drawing the money down and paying tax on it. Those…
Social Security offers something rare in federal programs: a genuine do-over. A retiree who claims benefits and then decides the timing was wrong can withdraw the application entirely, erase the early claim, and file again later for a larger monthly check. The reset is powerful, but it comes with a short deadline and a demanding…
Wait, and the check grows. That single lever separates the retiree who claims Social Security the day it becomes available at 62 from the one who holds out until 70. Every month of delay past full retirement age earns a credit that lifts the monthly benefit, and unlike a stock market gain, the increase is…
The founder of a Georgia investment firm that prosecutors call the largest Ponzi scheme in state history was sentenced this week to the maximum term the law allows. Todd Burkhalter, the chief executive of Drive Planning, drew 20 years in federal prison for a fraud that took roughly $380 million from more than 2,000 investors,…
Walgreens is thinning its store network again, and this round reaches into neighborhoods that have leaned on the drugstore for decades. The second-largest pharmacy chain in the country expects to close roughly 100 locations in 2026 and has already gone further behind the scenes, closing a major distribution center. When a store shuts, the prescriptions…
When a husband or wife dies, Social Security does not keep paying both benefits the couple had been collecting. Instead, the surviving spouse moves up to the larger of the two checks, in many cases the full amount the late partner had been drawing. The trade-off is that the household loses the smaller payment entirely,…
Every autumn, Medicare beneficiaries brace for premium and copay changes. This fall, a larger shock is arriving for millions of them: the plan itself is going away. Insurers are pulling out of Medicare Advantage markets for the 2027 plan year at a pace that will force a wave of older Americans to shop for coverage…