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.
State plans to bar SNAP recipients from buying soda and candy with food-stamp benefits are being pushed back in several states after the U.S. Department of Agriculture asked for more time to sort out the rules following a federal court ruling this summer. South Carolina, North Dakota and Ohio all had waivers approved to start…
Moving to attend a different school, or switching from campus classes to an online course load, can change a veteran’s GI Bill deposit before a single class begins. The Post-9/11 GI Bill’s Monthly Housing Allowance is not a flat number; it is pegged to local rental costs near the school a veteran actually attends, and…
Veterans and eligible family members attending private or foreign colleges this fall have a higher ceiling on what the Department of Veterans Affairs will pay directly to their school. Under the Post-9/11 GI Bill, the maximum private-school tuition and fee payment for the 2026-27 academic year rose to $30,908.34, an increase tied by law to…
Hawaii is the one place in the country where food-stamp benefits are set to shrink rather than grow this fall, with the maximum monthly allotment for a four-person household dropping to $1,655 when the new federal fiscal year begins October 1. Every other state, along with the District of Columbia, Alaska, Guam and the U.S….
For the third straight budget cycle, the White House has proposed eliminating all federal funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, the decades-old program that helps roughly six million low-income households cover heating and cooling bills. The proposal is not law, and Congress has rejected the same request in each of the prior…
A class-action settlement is paying compensation to people who were notified that their personal information was exposed in a September 2025 data breach at California Casualty Indemnity Exchange, an insurer that serves educators, law enforcement officers, firefighters and nurses. Eligible individuals can file a claim for as much as $4,000 in documented losses, or accept…
Medicaid’s new community-engagement requirement is usually described as an 80-hour-a-month rule, but federal guidance also allows enrollees to satisfy it a different way: by showing at least $580 in monthly earnings, regardless of how many actual hours that income took to earn. For someone whose work hours fluctuate week to week, or whose pay comes…
A food-stamp work requirement that used to stop applying once a recipient turned 55 now follows able-bodied adults without dependents all the way to 64, pulling roughly a million additional older adults into a category where continued benefits depend on logging paid or unpaid work hours. The change came from the One Big Beautiful Bill…
The Federal Trade Commission has told a federal court that Amazon will begin sending a new round of automatic refund payments to Prime subscribers on October 1, 2026, and that the maximum amount available to each eligible consumer has risen sharply from an earlier cap. The change comes out of the FTC’s September 2025 settlement…
Grocery shoppers are heading into the fall with a genuinely mixed picture at the register: one staple is finally getting cheaper after years of painful increases, while another everyday habit keeps getting more expensive. For a retiree working through a fixed monthly budget, the two trends don’t cancel each other out evenly, since how much…