The financial news that actually matters
A general consumer finance category covering everyday money decisions, budgeting, saving, debt management, credit behavior, and personal financial improvement strategies.
About 3.7 million people are expected to fly over the Memorial Day holiday weekend, according to Airlines for America, the industry trade group that tracks passenger volume around peak travel periods. If you are one of them and your flight gets canceled, you will not have to beg for your money back. A federal rule…
One in five credit reports contains an error that can cost you a loan – and you can now pull all three bureaus free every week A stranger’s unpaid credit card balance sitting on your file. A mortgage payment marked 90 days late when it was never missed. A collections account from a hospital visit…
When Brittany Cloyd, a Kentucky teacher, went to an in-network emergency room in 2021 for complications during pregnancy, she was treated by an out-of-network physician she never chose. The bill ran into the thousands. “I did everything right,” Cloyd told lawmakers during congressional testimony that helped build the case for federal action. “I went to…
Voice-cloning scams are not new, but the barrier to launching one has nearly vanished. In early 2026, security researchers demonstrated that a freely available cloning tool could replicate a speaker’s voice from a three-second audio sample with enough fidelity to fool family members on a phone call. That finding puts a concrete number on a…
Amazon made canceling Prime so frustrating that its own employees had a name for the process: “Iliad,” after Homer’s epic about a war that ground on for ten years. The Federal Trade Commission agreed it was a problem, and the agency’s $2.5 billion settlement with Amazon is now paying out. If you tried to cancel…
Picture a 34-year-old teacher in Columbus, Ohio, logging into her loan servicer’s portal for the first time since 2020 and discovering that three missed payments she never knew about have already dragged her credit score below the threshold for the mortgage rate she was quoted last spring. She is not alone. Across the country, the…
When Maya Chen, a communications major at Ohio State, plugged her expected $80,000 starting salary into a budget spreadsheet last January, the numbers looked comfortable: a downtown Columbus one-bedroom, standard loan payments, even a modest car note. By April, after a string of interviews that quoted salaries in the low $40,000s, she had scrapped the…
A saver with $50,000 parked at a typical big-bank branch earned roughly $190 in interest last year. Over the same 12 months, inflation shaved about $1,900 off that money’s purchasing power. The net result was a quiet, invisible loss of more than $1,700, and millions of Americans are still absorbing it every month without realizing…
Picture this: your child is 17, applying for their first student loan, and the lender calls to say the application was denied. The reason? A credit card opened eight years ago in a city your family has never visited, tied to your kid’s Social Security number. The account went to collections in 2022. You had…
Subscriptions must now be as easy to cancel as they were to start — a new FTC “click-to-cancel” rule bars the endless phone trees and hidden buttons In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission received more than 16,000 public comments on a proposed rule to fix a problem nearly every American with a credit card has…