The financial news that actually matters
Roughly 8 million federal student loan borrowers, according to a Department of Education estimate from early 2026 (actual enrollment may have shifted since then), are still parked in the SAVE repayment plan, and in about five weeks, the government is going to start moving them out. The U.S. Department of Education has confirmed that loan…
Picture a 16-year-old lifeguard who earns $3,500 between Memorial Day and Labor Day. After buying a pair of sneakers and setting aside gas money, she still has enough to do something most adults wish they had done at her age: open a Roth IRA. If she puts $2,000 into that account and never adds another…
A retired worker collecting the average Social Security check today would see roughly $81 more per month starting next January if early cost-of-living adjustment estimates hold. And for the first time, the average spousal benefit would cross $1,000 a month, a threshold that has been inching closer for years but never quite arrived. As of…
A homeowner who locked in a 2.9-percent mortgage in the spring of 2021 is not going to miss that payment if there is any way to avoid it. Lose the house, and the next loan comes at nearly 7 percent. That calculus, repeated across tens of millions of households, helps explain one of the most…
When a licensed firearms dealer in Mississippi lost his business checking account in 2014, the bank told him only that the relationship had been “terminated.” No fraud allegation. No compliance violation. Just a letter and a locked-out login. He was one of dozens of gun retailers, payday lenders, and tobacco sellers who told the Department…
Somewhere in a kitchen drawer or a pile of unopened mail, millions of American homeowners have a property-tax assessment notice they never questioned. The number on it may be wrong, and not in their favor. A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by economists Carlos Avenancio-León and Troup Howard, which examines racial disparities in…
The Federal Reserve’s next interest rate decision lands June 16, and futures traders have already written the script: no cut. The CME FedWatch tool, which translates fed-funds futures into implied probabilities, shows a zero-percent chance the committee lowers its benchmark rate at the June meeting. That leaves the target range at 4.25 to 4.50 percent,…
Somewhere in the retirement system, there is probably an account with your name on it that you have completely forgotten about. Maybe it is from a job you left five years ago, or ten, or fifteen. Maybe the plan changed administrators and the statements stopped coming. Maybe the balance felt too small to deal with…
Picture a 34-year-old teacher in Columbus, Ohio, logging into her loan servicer’s portal for the first time since 2020 and discovering that three missed payments she never knew about have already dragged her credit score below the threshold for the mortgage rate she was quoted last spring. She is not alone. Across the country, the…
Americans lost a record $2.1 billion to scams originating on social media in 2025, making it the single biggest channel for reported fraud losses in the country, ahead of phone calls, email, text messages, and every other contact method tracked by the Federal Trade Commission, which published the figures in April 2026. The schemes range…