Category: Your Money

Cigna is walking away from the individual Affordable Care Act marketplace entirely, not trimming it, and the fallout lands on 369,000 people across 11 states who now have to find a new health plan before their current one disappears at the end of the year. The exit is one more entry in a wave of…

A retiree who dies leaving a will, a list of bank accounts, and a filing cabinet full of paperwork can still leave an estate stuck for months over something none of that paperwork covers: the online banking login, the email account tied to two-factor authentication codes, and the handful of financial apps that never printed…

Millions of Americans prepay for their own funerals to spare their families from making costly decisions under pressure, but the arrangement carries a risk many buyers never consider: what happens if the funeral home closes or changes ownership before the money is ever used. State law, not federal law, decides whether a family’s advance payment…

Two types of tax-advantaged health accounts sound similar on paper, both let a worker set aside pre-tax money for medical costs, but the fine print on what happens to unspent money at year’s end could not be more different. Confusing the two can mean losing money that a worker assumed was safely banked for future…

Congress created a needs-based pension for the surviving spouses of wartime veterans that has nothing to do with combat exposure, a service-connected disability, or whether the veteran ever filed a VA claim while alive — yet a meaningful share of eligible widows and widowers have never filed the claim that would start the monthly payments,…

Veterans who qualify for the VA’s needs-based pension are not always aware that a second layer of support exists once daily life becomes difficult to manage without help. That add-on, Aid and Attendance, can meaningfully raise a veteran’s monthly payment, but it only applies after a veteran has already cleared the eligibility bar for the…

When an illness or injury leaves a patient unable to talk with doctors, someone still has to decide whether to continue treatment, transfer to hospice care, or pursue aggressive intervention. Without instructions on file, that decision can fall to family members guessing at what a loved one would have wanted, or in some cases to…

A parent or grandparent who leaves money directly to an heir with a significant disability can unintentionally end that person’s Supplemental Security Income and Medicaid eligibility the moment the inheritance arrives. A properly drafted trust is one of the few tools that lets the same money reach that heir without triggering a benefits cutoff. Why…

Settling an estate looks, on paper, like a simple sequence: pay the bills, then hand out what’s left to the people named in the will. An executor or administrator who reverses that order — distributing money to heirs while a federal tax debt is still outstanding — can end up owing the shortfall out of…

A single line on a brokerage account-opening form gives a firm a way to intervene when an older investor’s account shows signs of financial exploitation, without giving that named person any control over the money itself. Financial firms are required to try to collect this information, yet many account holders leave the field blank or…