The financial news that actually matters
The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.51% in the Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey for the week ending May 22, 2026, its highest reading since late August 2025. That number, on its own, is not the story. The story is that it barely differs from the reading in January, or February, or March. For most…
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…
A one-bedroom apartment in Austin, Texas, that rented for $1,450 a month in the summer of 2023 can now be found for closer to $1,300, often with a month or two of free rent thrown in. Across the country, the story is similar in scale if not in specifics: after five years of relentless increases,…
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…
A year ago, a one-bedroom apartment in downtown Austin listed for around $1,650 a month. Today, a comparable unit in the same neighborhood can be had for closer to $1,550, and often with a month of free rent thrown in. That kind of price cut would have been laughable during the pandemic-era bidding wars. Now…
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…
Hundreds of thousands of homeowners who trusted Lakeview Loan Servicing with their mortgage payments may be owed money, and the window to collect it is closing fast. A $26 million class action settlement is paying affected borrowers up to $5,000 each, but the claim deadline is June 22, 2026. Anyone who misses it will almost…
A homeowner in suburban Houston who locked in a 2.9% mortgage rate in early 2021 recently opened her annual escrow analysis letter and found a $247 increase in her monthly payment. Her interest rate hadn’t changed. Her principal balance was shrinking on schedule. But her county had reassessed her home’s taxable value up by 28%,…
A year ago, a buyer in suburban Virginia who asked for a home inspection risked losing the deal. This spring, that same buyer can request repairs, negotiate closing credits, and still have time to sleep on it. The shift is showing up in hard numbers: in April 2026, new listings across the Mid-Atlantic outpaced new…