The financial news that actually matters
Maria Gonzalez bought her three-bedroom house in Cape Coral, Florida, in 2019 with a fixed-rate mortgage she could comfortably afford. She never missed a payment. Then, in early 2025, her monthly bill jumped by $287. The principal and interest had not changed. Her property taxes were flat. What changed was her homeowners insurance, which her…
A buyer who qualified for a $400,000 home last week just lost a little more ground. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate rose to 6.37%, up from 6.30% seven days earlier, according to Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey. That is the second straight weekly increase and pushes borrowing costs further from the sub-6% territory…
A year ago, Cape Coral, Florida, was still riding the tail end of a pandemic housing boom that had doubled some neighborhood valuations in under four years. That ride is over. Home prices in the Cape Coral-Fort Myers metro fell roughly 9% in the first quarter of 2026 compared with a year earlier, based on…
A house in suburban Austin sat on the market for 97 days before the seller finally dropped the price by $40,000. A townhome outside Tampa collected three open-house signs and zero offers over two months. Stories like these have become routine in parts of the country where the housing market has flipped from frenzied to…
Cape Coral, Florida, once one of the most sought-after housing markets in the country, now holds a distinction no homeowner wants: the steepest price decline of any major U.S. metro. Median sale prices in the Cape Coral-Fort Myers area fell about 9% year over year in early 2026, according to quarterly data from ATTOM, a…
When Marcus Ellington closed on his three-bedroom in suburban Denver in September 2023, his 30-year fixed rate came in at 7.12%. “I knew it was ugly,” he told himself at the time, “but the house wasn’t going to wait.” Two and a half years later, Ellington is one of a growing wave of homeowners rushing…
A homeowner in Cape Coral, Florida, who locked in a 3.25% mortgage rate in 2021 expected a stable monthly payment for the next 30 years. The loan has performed exactly as promised. What nobody underwrote was the insurance bill: her annual premium jumped from $1,800 to nearly $5,400 over three years, and when the increase…
When Maria Delgado bought a three-bedroom house in Cape Coral, Florida, in early 2022, her agent told her she was lucky to get it. Multiple offers had pushed the price $40,000 above asking. Three years later, comparable homes on her street are listed for less than she paid, and some have sat on the market…
Every spring, the housing market is supposed to wake up. Tax refunds land, school calendars create urgency, and warmer weather pulls buyers off the sidelines. Spring 2026 has not followed the script. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate climbed to 6.50% in Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey for the week ending May 22, 2026,…
When State Farm sent renewal notices to tens of thousands of California homeowners in early 2026, the numbers told a blunt story: premiums were jumping 17% in a single year. For a policyholder paying $2,400 annually, that meant roughly $400 more, on top of increases that had already accumulated over the previous four years. The…