The financial news that actually matters
A dozen large eggs at a Kroger in suburban Columbus, Ohio, rang up at $1.89 last week. A year ago, the same carton cost north of $4. Across the country, the national average for Grade A large eggs has dropped back toward $2 a dozen, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ most recent retail…
You split a $120 sneaker purchase into four biweekly payments, forgot about the third one, and moved on with your life. A year ago, that missed installment would have vanished into the void. Now it can show up on your credit report and chip away at the same FICO score a mortgage lender pulls when…
For years, business owners in legal but politically sensitive industries have described the same experience: a phone call or a letter from their bank, sometimes with little explanation, informing them that their accounts were being closed. Firearms dealers, cryptocurrency startups, adult entertainers, and advocacy groups on both ends of the political spectrum have reported being…
A homebuyer in Dallas putting 10 percent down on a $400,000 house this month will pay roughly $2,528 in principal and interest every month for the next 30 years. A nurse in Chicago carrying $5,000 on a variable-rate credit card will hand over about $1,075 in interest this year alone. And neither number is likely…
The pump at a Wawa station outside Philadelphia read $4.51 on a Tuesday morning in late May 2026. Cars idled in a line that stretched past the lot and onto the access road, drivers checking phones, doing math, deciding whether to fill the tank or stop at half. Across the country, the same number glared…
Starting in July 2026, parents of roughly 5.4 million children will be eligible to open a new kind of federally funded investment account. Under a provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law in 2025, the U.S. government deposits $1,000 into an account for every American baby born between January 1, 2025,…
A graduate student borrowing $50,000 in federal loans this fall will pay roughly $8,000 more in interest over a standard 10-year repayment than a classmate who borrowed the same amount in 2023-24. That gap is the direct result of a rate reset taking effect July 1, 2026: new Direct Unsubsidized loans for graduate and professional…
Somewhere in the stack of proposals Congress is weighing to keep Social Security solvent, one idea keeps surfacing in budget discussions on Capitol Hill: put a hard ceiling on benefits so that no retiree collects more than $50,000 a year, no matter how much they paid into the system over a career. The cap would…
Millions of taxpayers who paid failure-to-pay penalties on their 2020 or 2021 federal returns may be owed refunds they have never collected. In late 2023, the IRS announced it would automatically reverse those penalties for filers whose assessed balance was under $100,000, a direct response to the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. But more…
Meta eliminated roughly 8,000 positions this week in its largest single round of layoffs since early 2023. About 7,000 employees who survived the cuts received new assignments: build the artificial intelligence systems that rendered their former colleagues unnecessary. Another 6,000 open positions will go unfilled, pushing the total headcount reduction to roughly 14,000. The layoffs…