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.
More than a year after Congress repealed the rules that had shrunk Social Security checks for millions of retired teachers, police officers and firefighters, tens of thousands of them still do not know how many months of back pay they are actually owed. The gap traces to a single question the 2023 repeal law never…
A bill in the U.S. House would increase Social Security benefits and change how the program is funded in an effort to extend the life of its trust funds, according to the measure’s own text. The Strengthening Social Security Act of 2026 arrives as the program’s trustees have again reported a firm depletion timeline for…
A year-end accounting from the Labor Department’s benefits enforcement arm shows that more than 8,000 people who once worked for companies with pension plans that later shut down have collected money the law says they were owed all along. The recoveries did not happen this week or even this year — they cover fiscal year…
A bill introduced in the U.S. Senate this summer would index to inflation the income thresholds that determine how much of a retiree’s Social Security check gets taxed — numbers that have not moved since the early 1980s and mid-1990s. Because those thresholds are fixed dollar figures written into the tax code rather than numbers…
A Medicare Advantage exodus that unfolded across 2025 is still showing up on renewal notices a year later. About 2.6 million people lost their Medicare Advantage coverage when insurers pulled out of their markets, and industry researchers estimate that roughly 440,000 of them bought a Medigap policy for 2026 using a federal right that waived…
Aetna has told the outside marketing organizations that sell its Medicare Advantage plans that it will not pay agents or brokers a commission for enrolling new members in 123 of its plans across 33 states for the 2027 plan year. The freeze, distributed in a notice last month, does not cancel a single plan or…
A federal search tool built to reconnect workers with retirement money they left behind at old jobs has logged its first full year of results, and the numbers show both promise and a persistent gap. Nearly 70,000 of the roughly 236,000 people who logged into the Retirement Savings Lost and Found database between its December…
The federal agency that insures pension checks for retirees in union and multi-employer plans has raised the price of that insurance again. For plan years beginning in 2026, the flat-rate premium those plans pay the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation rises to $40 per participant, up from $39 the year before, a routine-looking dollar increase that…
The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the federal agency that insures private pension plans when they run short of money, backstops a far larger slice of the American workforce than most retirees realize. Its Multiemployer Program alone stands behind about 11.1 million workers and retirees spread across roughly 1,300 pension plans, a footprint built from decades…
The federal agency that insures private-sector pensions has disclosed how much money it spent last year propping up some of the country’s shakiest retirement funds. During fiscal year 2025, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation paid $6.2 billion in one-time assistance to 48 multiemployer pension plans that could not otherwise keep paying full benefits, money that…
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