Category: Your Money

For many older homeowners, a paid-off house is the largest asset they will leave behind, and probate can tie it up in court for months while heirs wait. A transfer-on-death deed offers a way around that delay: it names who inherits the property and hands it over automatically at death, with no probate case. The…

Heating and cooling costs are among the least flexible expenses in a fixed-income household, and for many older adults they arrive as a bill that has to be paid before almost anything else. A federal program exists specifically to blunt that pressure, covering part of an energy bill and stepping in when a shutoff looms….

A grandparent who names a young grandchild as the beneficiary of a life-insurance policy usually believes the arrangement is the simplest and most loving choice possible. In practice it can be one of the most complicated. Insurers will not hand a large death benefit directly to a child, and when nothing else is set up,…

Few savings instruments carry a promise as clean as the one attached to a Series EE savings bond: hold it for 20 years and the U.S. Treasury guarantees it will be worth at least double what was paid for it. That guarantee has made EE bonds a quiet fixture of conservative savings for decades. But…

Money slips out of people’s hands without any theft or loss: a final paycheck from a job left years ago, a utility deposit never refunded, an insurance payout mailed to an old address, the balance of a bank account that quietly went dormant. When a business cannot reach the owner for long enough, it is…

Nearly $29.7 billion in U.S. savings bonds have reached the end of their earning life and are simply sitting in the Treasury’s records — fully matured, drawing no interest, and waiting for owners or heirs who often do not know the bonds exist. Paper certificates tucked into drawers, safe deposit boxes, and old files quietly…

Two data-breach settlements are handing out cash to people who were never asked to prove a single dollar of loss, and both filing windows shut in early fall. Circle K, the convenience-store chain, and American Consumer Credit Counseling, a national nonprofit that helps households dig out of debt, have each set up funds that pay…

Few threats land harder on an older person living alone than the prospect of losing heat, light, or water within the hour. Scammers know it, and they build their script around that fear. Posing as the electric, gas, or water company, they call to say the account is past due and service will be cut…

Identity thieves who get hold of a name, birth date, and Social Security number can try to open credit cards, loans, or accounts in a victim’s name. One free tool shuts that door more firmly than almost anything else a consumer can do, yet many older Americans have never used it. Placing a security freeze…

Paying by credit card comes with a safety net most people never think about until they need it. If a charge is fraudulent or an order never arrives, the cardholder can dispute it and the bank can claw the money back. That protection does not travel with every payment method. Money sent through Zelle, a…