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.
Ten dollars and fifty cents is the exact toll USPS is adding to one specific shipment: a 25-pound Priority Mail Express package mailed to Zone 5. That figure comes from the Postal Service’s own temporary holiday pricing filing, approved by its federal regulator and now scheduled to take effect Oct. 4, 2026. It is one…
Mailing a package just got more expensive for the next three and a half months. The U.S. Postal Service’s temporary holiday-season price increase took formal approval from its federal regulator on Sept. 9, 2026 and is set to begin Oct. 4, averaging about 6% across its shipping products. Letters and stamps are untouched by the…
Five million people no longer have a SNAP card that works, and roughly one in three of them is a child. That collapse in enrollment did not happen because a program shut down. It happened because a law rewrote who has to prove they are working, how often, and until what age, then let the…
A federal antitrust settlement over Deere & Company’s control of repair tools carries a headline cash number that undersells what the deal is actually worth to the farmers who file a claim. The fund itself is $99 million, but the court-appointed administrator’s own notice puts the settlement’s total value far higher once the repair-tool access…
A SNAP household whose benefits get stolen through card skimming today has no federal program standing behind a replacement. That authority expired at the end of 2024, and Congress has not brought it back. Virginia is responding at the state level instead, moving all 749,000 of its SNAP recipients onto chip-enabled EBT cards by the…
A debt-collection operation that chased Massachusetts residents by seizing their cars is now permanently barred from doing business in the state, under a settlement Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell’s office announced on September 14. The deal cancels roughly $52 million owed by more than 6,000 people and closes out a case the office built around…
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has filed suit against three insulin and diabetes-drug manufacturers and three pharmacy benefit managers, accusing the companies of inflating list prices and returning most of that markup to middlemen through rebates rather than lowering what patients pay. The complaint leans on a specific figure drawn from a drugmaker’s own courtroom…
A bipartisan group of 31 senators sent a letter to the Trump administration on Sept. 18 pressing the Department of Health and Human Services to release Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program funds to states before cold weather sets in. The senators say a stopgap funding law already on the books requires the agency to…
New York Attorney General Letitia James announced on September 16, 2026, that two Westchester County car dealerships in Mt. Kisco, DARCARS Lexus and DARCARS BMW, will pay more than $1 million in refunds to car buyers and lessees who were overcharged through a misleading “sales commission” fee and an add-on package presented as mandatory. The…
FleetCor Technologies, now known as Corpay, and its chief executive, Ronald Clarke, will pay $100 million to settle a Federal Trade Commission administrative action over hidden fuel-card fees, the agency announced September 17. The deal follows rulings by a federal district court in 2023 and a federal appeals court in 2026 that found FleetCor charged…