The financial news that actually matters
Television and mailbox pitches promise retirees fast cash: sign over a stream of future settlement or pension checks and walk away with a lump sum today. The offers arrive dressed as convenience and freedom. Beneath the language sits a transaction in which the buyer keeps years of guaranteed payments and hands the seller a fraction…
A retirement rollover looks like a simple errand: move money from a former employer’s 401(k) into an individual retirement account and keep it growing tax-deferred. Done one way, nothing is taxed and nothing is withheld. Done another way, the plan is required to send a fifth of the balance to the government and start a…
Every scam call that opens with a retiree’s correct name, age, and street address started somewhere, and that somewhere is often a data broker. A sprawling, lightly regulated industry compiles detailed profiles on nearly every American adult and sells them by the thousand, including lists sorted by age and assumed wealth. Those lists are a…
The caller sounds like the real thing. He gives a name, a badge number, and a case number, and he says a warrant has been issued because a summons for jury duty was ignored. The arrest can be avoided, he explains, by paying a fine right now over the phone. Nothing about that call is…
The pitch arrives as good news. A caller, a Facebook message, or an official-looking email announces that a retiree has been selected for a federal grant of several thousand dollars, free money that never has to be repaid. There is only one catch: a processing fee, a tax, or a delivery charge has to be…
A pitch has been reaching cash-strapped homeowners, many of them retirees on fixed incomes: take a lump sum today, make no monthly payments, and simply share a portion of the home’s future value when the house is sold or the term ends. It is marketed as an “investment” rather than a loan, which makes it…
When a longtime family home passes to the next generation, one provision in the tax code can quietly wipe out decades of taxable gain. It is called the step-up in basis, and it resets the value of an inherited asset to what it was worth on the day the owner died. For an heir who…
A single rule cuts through nearly every version of the account-takeover scam aimed at older savers: a real bank will never ask a customer to read back a one-time passcode. That short string of digits, texted or emailed during login, is the lock a criminal is missing. Anyone on the phone requesting it, no matter…
The strongest single defense against having a loan or credit card opened in someone else’s name costs nothing and takes only a few minutes at each credit bureau. It is called a security freeze, and since 2018 federal law has made it free to place and free to lift for everyone. For retirees, whose Social…
A medical bill that lands with a collection agency feels final, and the instinct for many older Americans is to pay whatever number appears on the letter as fast as possible to make it go away. That instinct can be expensive. Medical debt is one of the most negotiable balances a person carries, riddled with…