The financial news that actually matters
A credit card balance of $6,600 is not unusual. According to TransUnion’s quarterly credit industry reports, the average card balance per borrower has hovered near that figure in recent quarters. What is unusual is what that balance now costs to carry: approximately $1,570 a year in interest, with zero dollars going toward paying it off….
Put $10,000 into a Series EE savings bond right now and the government will pay you 2.40% a year, fixed for life. Hold that same bond for 20 years and the government promises it will be worth $20,000, no matter what. Those two numbers do not add up on their own, and the gap between…
A golden retriever tears its cruciate ligament chasing a squirrel. The diagnosis takes 20 minutes. The estimate comes back at $5,200. The owner, standing in an emergency clinic lobby at 10 p.m., has no pet insurance, no surgical savings fund, and a front-desk staffer sliding a credit application across the counter. This scenario plays out…
A widow in her late 70s whose husband served in Vietnam and died of complications from high blood pressure used to face a nearly impossible task: proving, with medical records and expert testimony, that his hypertension traced back to Agent Orange sprayed in a jungle decades ago. Most never tried. The Department of Veterans Affairs…
European Wax Center agreed to pay $5 million to settle a class action lawsuit alleging that its website secretly tracked visitors using advertising pixels, and now anyone who visited WaxCenter.com between June 2023 and April 2026 can file a claim for an estimated $10. The deadline to submit a claim is June 30, 2026. The…
If you were a patient of Cardiovascular Consultants, the large cardiology practice serving the Phoenix metropolitan area, your medical records may have been part of a 2023 data breach that exposed the personal and health information of 484,000 people. A class action settlement now entitles affected patients to claim up to $5,000 in documented losses…
Millions of Americans swipe a debit or credit card at a shared laundry machine every week without thinking twice about where that data goes. Last summer, they got an uncomfortable answer. CSC ServiceWorks, the company behind roughly one million networked washers and dryers in apartment buildings, college dorms, and laundromats across all 50 states and…
A single missed credit card payment can crater a FICO score by 60 to 110 points, according to FICO’s scoring breakdown. (FICO has published research showing that range for consumers starting near 780, though the specific data set is not linked from its public education pages.) For someone sitting at 780, that kind of drop…
A wartime veteran who needs help getting dressed in the morning, or a surviving spouse who can no longer bathe safely without assistance, may be entitled to a tax-free monthly check from the Department of Veterans Affairs worth more than many households spend on rent. The benefit is called Aid and Attendance, it has been…
Nearly four years after Congress passed the PACT Act with bipartisan fanfare, veterans who filed toxic-exposure claims under the law are running into a painful contradiction: the statute that was supposed to fast-track their benefits has funneled them into one of the slowest processing pipelines at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Multiple veteran service organizations,…