The financial news that actually matters
Two borrowers walk into the same lender’s office in May 2026, looking at the same house listed near the national median price. Both put 10% down. Both choose a 30-year fixed mortgage. The only difference: one has a 740 FICO score and the other has a 660. That 80-point gap will cost the lower-score borrower…
Consider the math facing a homeowner who locked in a 2.75% mortgage rate in early 2021 and now wants to buy a comparable house. At today’s roughly 6.6% rate, the new loan would cost $600 to $800 more per month in interest alone on a typical balance. For most families, that gap ends the conversation…
Subscriptions must now be as easy to cancel as they were to start — a new FTC “click-to-cancel” rule bars the endless phone trees and hidden buttons In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission received more than 16,000 public comments on a proposed rule to fix a problem nearly every American with a credit card has…
Millions of homeowners who could not scrape together a 20 percent down payment are quietly paying an extra $100 to $250 a month in private mortgage insurance. For years, Congress offered a partial remedy: a federal tax deduction for those premiums. Then it let the provision expire. Then it renewed it retroactively. Then it expired…
Until now, most Medicare beneficiaries who wanted Wegovy or Zepbound had exactly one option: pay full price. At roughly $1,350 a month for Wegovy and a similar sticker for Zepbound, according to GoodRx pharmacy pricing data, that meant the vast majority of seniors on fixed incomes simply went without. That changes on July 1, 2026….
Long-term care insurance premiums can easily run $2,000 to $4,000 a year for someone in their mid-50s, and for workers under 59½, the most obvious pot of money to pay them has always been off-limits. Tap a 401(k) early and the IRS charges a 10 percent penalty on top of ordinary income tax. That math…
The Social Security Administration’s 2026 benefit tables spell out a striking reward for patience: a worker who delays claiming until age 70 can collect up to $5,181 a month, roughly $1,000 more than the maximum available at full retirement age and nearly double what an early claimer at 62 would receive. Over a full year,…
Millions of Americans who filed their 2025 federal tax returns expecting a paper refund check are waiting for money that will never show up in their mailbox. Starting October 1, 2025, the IRS stopped issuing most paper refund checks to individual taxpayers. If you filed without valid direct deposit information, your refund is not lost,…
For the first time in the history of federal housing surveys, renting the typical American home costs more than $12,000 a year less than buying it. That record gap, confirmed in the Census Bureau’s first-quarter 2026 Housing Vacancies and Homeownership survey, has upended a bedrock assumption of middle-class financial planning: that owning almost always beats…
Banks reimbursed only a fraction of Zelle and wire-transfer scam losses last year – leaving most victims to swallow thousands in stolen funds themselves When the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued the company behind Zelle and three of America’s largest banks in December 2024, the agency laid out a pattern that millions of account holders…