The financial news that actually matters
The text arrives mid-morning, from a number you don’t recognize: “Hi, are you interested in a remote position? $300/day, flexible hours.” If you’ve been job hunting for a while, your thumb hovers over the reply button. Don’t tap it. In the first half of 2024, Americans reported losing more than $220 million to job scams,…
Sportsman’s Warehouse customers who swiped a credit or debit card at the outdoor retailer in 2024 may have had their payment data stolen, and a settlement tied to the breach could put up to $107 in their hands. The catch: the filing deadline is June 19, and many eligible shoppers still have no idea they…
Last spring, a borrower in Dallas called her credit card issuer to cancel a Visa she hadn’t swiped in three years. She had no balance on it, no annual fee, and no reason to keep the plastic. Six weeks later, when she applied for a mortgage, her FICO score had dropped from 741 to 709….
Try to wire $400,000 to a title company for a home closing in June 2026 and the bank will tack on a fee that has barely budged since the Obama administration. Chase charges $25 for a domestic outgoing wire and $40 to $50 for an international send, according to its most recent published fee schedule….
Illinois restaurant owners spent months reprogramming point-of-sale terminals and renegotiating processing contracts, all to prepare for a state law that would have stopped banks from collecting swipe fees on the tax and tip portions of credit card transactions. That law was set to kick in on July 1, 2026. It will never apply to the…
When a suburban Cook County, Illinois, homeowner opened his 2025 reassessment notice and saw an 18-percent jump with no changes to the property, he did what a growing number of taxpayers are doing: he logged into the county’s SmartFile portal, uploaded photos and sales data from three nearby houses, and submitted the whole thing in…
Every month a 67-year-old waits to file for Social Security, the government adds two-thirds of 1 percent to their benefit. That does not sound like much until you let it compound: three full years of patience, from 67 to 70, produces a check roughly 24 percent larger than the one available at full retirement age….
Open your payment dashboard from a gig platform or check your brokerage statement, and you might notice roughly a quarter of your earnings never showed up. No audit letter. No penalty notice. The money is already with the IRS, automatically siphoned because the Social Security number your payer has on file does not match what…
If you claim the standard deduction, every dollar you gave to charity over the past four years earned you exactly nothing at tax time. You could write a check to your church, fund a food bank, or send money after a hurricane, and the IRS treated it the same as if you had spent it…
A rideshare driver logging 20,000 miles a year just picked up an extra $500 in tax deductions without changing a single route. That is the practical effect of the IRS raising its standard business mileage rate to 72.5 cents per mile for 2026, up 2.5 cents from the 2025 rate of 70 cents. The new…