The financial news that actually matters
Most people think of a Social Security decision as a single yes-or-no moment: file, or don’t. There is a third path that many retirees never learn about. A person who has reached full retirement age can suspend benefits, pausing the monthly checks so that the future payment grows. Each month spent in suspension adds delayed-retirement…
One of the most valuable breaks in the tax code rewards families for something they never planned. When a home, a stock portfolio, or other property passes to an heir at death, the tax clock on decades of growth is quietly reset. The inherited asset gets what tax law calls a stepped-up basis, and that…
Claiming Social Security is one of the biggest financial decisions a retiree makes, and it usually feels permanent. It is not always. The program includes a little-known reset that allows a person who filed too early to cancel the claim, return the money already received, and start over later at a higher monthly amount. The…
For most retirees, homeowners insurance is not an optional line in the budget. A mortgage lender requires it, and even a paid-off house is too valuable to leave uncovered. That makes the latest figure hard to sidestep: the average annual premium has climbed to roughly $3,057, the fifth straight year of increases, and the pace…
After years of watching prices climb faster than their Social Security checks, older Americans got a rare piece of good news in the latest inflation report. The government’s June reading showed the annual pace of price increases easing, led by a sharp drop at the gas pump. For retirees on fixed incomes, a slower rate…
A Maryland man has been arrested in connection with a gold-bar scheme that prosecutors say frightened older victims with a phony hacking alert, then convinced them to move their savings into a fake “Federal Reserve account” by converting the money into gold. The ruse ends the way many of these cases do, with a courier…
A man in Florence, Alabama, lost his life savings to a cryptocurrency con of the type investigators call “pig butchering,” and federal prosecutors moved in late June to forfeit $222,000 tied to the scheme, money the fraudsters had already pushed offshore. The case, made public around June 26, puts a single face on a crime…
The Federal Reserve meets on July 29, and traders overwhelmingly expect it to leave its benchmark interest rate unchanged. For borrowers that is a familiar holding pattern. For savers, and especially for retirees living on interest from cash, it is the reason the best savings accounts and certificates of deposit are still paying north of…
The gap between the best certificate of deposit and a typical one is wider than many retirees realize, and it comes straight out of interest that idle savings could be earning. Right now the strongest one-year CDs advertise yields near 4.30 percent, while the national average one-year CD pays roughly 1.65 percent. For an older…
A fresh wave of layoffs is landing hardest on the workers with the least time to bounce back. U.S. employers announced tens of thousands of job cuts in July, a sharp jump from the same month a year earlier, and older employees are among the most exposed. For a worker in their late 50s or…