The financial news that actually matters
Covers retirement planning, Social Security benefits, pension systems, and long-term financial security. It helps readers understand how to prepare financially for retirement.
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,…
Picture a retired teacher in Ohio pulling $95,000 a year from her pension and Social Security, comfortably below Medicare’s surcharge threshold. She converts $20,000 from a traditional IRA to a Roth, a routine tax-planning move. Two years later, her monthly Part B premium jumps from $202.90 to $284.10. The notice from the Social Security Administration…
If you were born in 1960 or later and you turn 62 this year, a decades-old change to Social Security law is finally catching up with you. For the first time, every American reaching the earliest claiming age in 2026 has a full retirement age (FRA) of 67, not 66 or 66 and a few…
Starting in July 2026, parents of roughly 5.4 million children will be eligible to open a new kind of federally funded investment account. Under a provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law in 2025, the U.S. government deposits $1,000 into an account for every American baby born between January 1, 2025,…
Somewhere in the stack of proposals Congress is weighing to keep Social Security solvent, one idea keeps surfacing in budget discussions on Capitol Hill: put a hard ceiling on benefits so that no retiree collects more than $50,000 a year, no matter how much they paid into the system over a career. The cap would…
When Social Security’s last May deposit hits bank accounts on May 27, 2026, retirees born after the 20th of the month will collect a check that looked like a raise back in January but has since been overtaken by rising prices. The 2.8 percent cost-of-living adjustment added roughly $56 a month to the average retirement…
A 61-year-old engineer in Dallas maxing out her 401(k) in 2025 could have socked away $3,250 more than her 58-year-old colleague down the hall, and most people in her position never touched the extra room. That gap exists because of a provision buried in the SECURE 2.0 Act that created a higher catch-up contribution limit…
Some widows, widowers and surviving divorced spouses have been opening their bank statements in recent months to find Social Security deposits several hundred dollars larger than expected. They did not file a new application. They did not call anyone. The Social Security Administration simply bumped them up. Under rules that have been on the books…