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.
Fifty-seven electric and natural-gas utilities across 48 states currently have pending requests before state regulators to raise the rates they charge, according to a tracker maintained by the energy-comparison site Electric Choice. The utilities are asking, on average, for a 13.2 percent increase, and the filings together touch a combined 125.1 million residential and commercial…
A Minnesota nonprofit dental provider has agreed to settle a class action lawsuit stemming from a targeted cyberattack that exposed patient records in December 2024. The settlement covers roughly 130,583 people and offers two ways to collect cash, plus two years of free medical and credit monitoring, but only for those who act before the…
A federal court in Pennsylvania has given preliminary approval to a $3,000,000 settlement resolving a class action tied to a 2024 cyberattack on Healthcare Services Group, Inc., a company that supplies housekeeping, laundry, dining and nutrition staff to nursing homes and senior-living communities nationwide. The deal compensates people whose personal information the company determined was…
A New York resident’s eligibility for this fall’s Protecting Our Wallets Energy Rebate turns on a return already sitting in the state’s files: a timely 2024 state income tax filing, full-time New York residency for that same year, income inside the program’s brackets, and not being claimed as a dependent on someone else’s return. Only…
For someone in their early 60s who buys health coverage directly from an insurer rather than through an employer, 2027 is shaping up to bring a second straight year of double-digit premium requests. That age group is unusually exposed: federal rules already let insurers charge older adults close to the legal maximum relative to a…
In Houston, a gallon of regular gasoline sold for $3.522 the week of August 31, 2026. In San Francisco that same week, the average was $5.552 — a gap of just over two dollars for the identical grade of fuel. Nationally, the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s weekly survey put the average retail price for regular…
A headline inflation rate of 3.4 percent sounds manageable, the kind of number that barely dents a monthly budget built around a fixed Social Security check. But averages hide what is actually happening at the meter and the pump. Energy prices climbed 14.7 percent over the 12 months ending in July 2026, more than four…
Posts sharing this settlement have circulated for weeks, some of them describing it in terms that make it sound like a life-changing payout tied to unsafe cookware chemicals. The settlement notice itself, filed in a Riverside County courtroom, describes something far smaller and far more specific: $6 for each qualifying pan, capped at $12 per…
A federal antitrust case over who is allowed to fix a tractor has produced a $99 million settlement fund, and the deadline to claim a share of it falls at the end of this year. The dispute centers on whether John Deere unlawfully required customers to use its own authorized dealers for repair work on…
A proposed class action settlement gives Lands’ End customers whose personal information was exposed in a December 2024 data breach two distinct ways to collect a payment, and the fine print separates them sharply. One option pays a flat amount the settlement administrator lists as roughly $60, with no paperwork required. The other can reach…