The financial news that actually matters
When a customer taps a credit card at a coffee shop in Chicago, the shop’s owner pays a fee, usually between 1.5% and 3% of the sale, to the bank that issued the card. That interchange fee funds a mix of fraud protection, cardholder rewards programs, and the network infrastructure that keeps digital payments running….
Roughly 8 million federal student loan borrowers are about to lose the repayment plan they signed up for, and the clock to pick a replacement is already running. The U.S. Department of Education has declared the SAVE plan unlawful and is winding it down. Loan servicers have begun sending notices to affected borrowers, each triggering…
A parent who borrowed $40,000 in federal PLUS loans and earns $55,000 a year could be paying roughly $500 a month under the only income-driven repayment plan that will remain available to them after June 30. Under a more generous plan they can still access today, that same parent might pay closer to $150. The…
If you run a firearms shop, a cryptocurrency exchange, or a religious nonprofit, you may already know what it feels like to open a letter from your bank informing you that your account is being closed, with no meaningful explanation attached. For years, businesses and individuals operating in legal but politically sensitive spaces have reported…
A parent borrowing $30,000 through the federal PLUS loan program this fall will pay roughly $17,200 in interest over a standard 10-year repayment term. Four years ago, when the same loan carried a rate of 5.30%, that interest bill would have been about $8,700. The difference, more than $8,500, buys nothing: no extra credits, no…
Students taking out federal loans for the 2026-27 academic year are on track to pay 6.52% interest, a rate that would be the steepest for new undergraduate borrowers since 2024-25, when the rate hit 6.53%. The increase reverses a brief dip during the 2025-26 cycle, when the rate fell to 6.53%’s predecessor of 6.53%. Once…
Illinois merchants were one day away from paying less every time a customer swiped a credit card. Then a federal regulator killed the discount before it started. On June 30, 2026, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency published an interim bulletin declaring that national banks and federal savings associations do not have to…
In the first three months of 2025, nearly one in four Americans who financed a new car committed to paying it off over seven years. That 22.9% share, reported in Edmunds’ Q1 2025 market analysis, has roughly doubled from the sub-12% level recorded in 2018. Over the same stretch, the average monthly payment on a…
If you’re one of the roughly 8 million people whose federal student loans have been frozen on the SAVE repayment plan since courts blocked it in mid-2024, the pause is about to end. Starting July 1, 2026, loan servicers will begin mailing notices that give each borrower 90 days to choose a different repayment plan….
If you run a gun shop, donate to controversial political causes, or operate a legal cannabis dispensary, you may have experienced something that thousands of Americans have reported over the past decade: your bank closed your account, offered little or no explanation, and left you scrambling to find another institution willing to take your money….