The financial news that actually matters
A customer with $25,000 sitting in a standard savings account at JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, or Wells Fargo will collect roughly $98 in interest over the next 12 months. Move that same balance to a high-yield online savings account at a bank like Marcus by Goldman Sachs, Ally, or Capital One 360, and the…
Some widows, widowers and surviving divorced spouses have been opening their bank statements in recent months to find Social Security deposits several hundred dollars larger than expected. They did not file a new application. They did not call anyone. The Social Security Administration simply bumped them up. Under rules that have been on the books…
A household earning $80,000 a year, right at the national median, can comfortably afford a monthly mortgage payment of roughly $1,870 under standard lending rules that cap housing costs at 28 percent of gross income. The problem: the actual payment on a median-priced U.S. home now runs closer to $2,960 a month, assuming a 20…
A retired school aide in Ohio. A former truck driver in Florida. A grandmother in Texas who co-signed a loan for a grandchild who never finished college. Across the country, millions of Americans over 55 are heading toward retirement with almost nothing saved, and a federal debt-collection mechanism that was dormant for years is now…
If you sold Bitcoin through Coinbase last year and figured the IRS would never notice a small discrepancy on your return, that bet no longer holds. Starting with the 2025 tax year, every centralized crypto exchange in the United States is required to file a new form, the 1099-DA, reporting the gross proceeds of your…
Maria Gonzalez, a preschool teacher in suburban Dallas, watched the pump display tick past $65 on Tuesday morning and pulled the nozzle early. She still had half a tank to go. “Last summer I could fill up for under fifty dollars,” she said. “Now I’m doing math in the parking lot, figuring out which errands…
Nearly 36 million Xfinity customers had their personal data stolen in October 2023, and Comcast is now paying $117.5 million to settle the class-action lawsuit that followed. The claims window is open, but it closes on August 14, 2025, and anyone who misses the deadline walks away with nothing. The settlement, reached in federal court,…
When Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance Corporation voted to lower personal-lines rates by an average of 8.7% this spring, it marked the state-backed insurer’s first rate cut in eight years, according to reporting from the Associated Press and contemporaneous news coverage, though Citizens has not yet published a formal press release or board resolution confirming the…
A dozen eggs cost $4.75 at the average U.S. supermarket in April 2026. Ground beef crossed $6 a pound months ago and stayed there. Cooking oil, bread flour, cheddar cheese: category after category, the receipt at checkout keeps growing, and the pipeline feeding those prices has been moving in one direction since last fall. Federal…
The phone screen showed Chase’s real customer-service number. The voice on the other end said they were calling from the bank’s fraud department and that the account had been compromised. Everything about the call looked right. But it wasn’t Chase. According to a federal criminal complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District…