The financial news that actually matters
If you were paying $85 a month under the SAVE plan, your next student loan bill could be $350 or more. And if you do nothing in the next 32 days, that jump happens automatically. On July 1, 2026, federal loan servicers will begin mailing notices to every borrower still enrolled in the now-defunct SAVE…
About 19 million individual tax returns each year arrive at the IRS under an extension, according to the agency’s filing-season statistics. The mechanism behind all of them is Form 4868, a one-page request that moves the federal filing deadline from April 15 to October 15. It costs nothing, takes roughly five minutes to complete online,…
Millions of Americans paid IRS penalties during the pandemic for filing taxes late or paying late. A federal court ruling now says many of those penalties should never have been assessed, and the money should be returned. But there is a hard deadline to claim it: July 10, 2026. As of early June 2026, that…
A single parent earning $20,000 a year and raising two children will see roughly $2,625 in refundable Child Tax Credit payments when filing a 2025 return. That money arrives as a direct deposit or paper check even if the parent owes zero federal income tax. The scenario became possible under permanent law on July 4,…
A taxpayer whose 2025 return showed $80,000 in total federal tax can make the IRS underpayment penalty vanish for 2026 by doing one thing: paying at least $88,000 through withholding and estimated payments over the course of the year. If the actual 2026 tax bill lands at $200,000, the $112,000 shortfall triggers no penalty at…
A family earning $45,000 a year and writing a tuition check for a freshman at a state university can file a federal tax return next spring and receive up to $1,000 in cash from the IRS, even if the household owes nothing in federal income tax. That payment comes from the American Opportunity Tax Credit,…
Somewhere in Texas right now, a home health aide earning $26,000 a year is eligible for a federal tax credit that could put more than $2,500 back in her pocket. She will probably never claim it. Texas has one of the lowest Earned Income Tax Credit participation rates in the country, and nationally, roughly one…
A married couple in Austin sells the house they bought in 2018 for $350,000. The closing price in 2026: $825,000. Their gain on paper is $475,000, and under federal tax law, every dollar of it can be excluded from income tax. A single neighbor with the same numbers would owe federal tax on $225,000 of…
A taxpayer who e-filed a federal return on January 27 and chose direct deposit could have seen the money in a bank account by Valentine’s Day. A taxpayer who dropped a paper return in the mail the same week might still be waiting in late March. That gap is not a glitch. It is the…
For the past eight years, roughly nine out of ten federal tax filers have gotten exactly zero tax benefit from their charitable donations. The reason was simple math: the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act nearly doubled the standard deduction, which made itemizing pointless for most households. You could write a $500 check to your…