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.
When an account holder dies, ordinary checking and savings balances often have to inch through probate, the court process that settles an estate, before heirs can touch a dime. A payable-on-death designation is the quiet workaround. By naming a beneficiary on the account, an account holder arranges for the cash to pass straight to that…
Adding a grown son or daughter to a checking or savings account can feel like tidy, loving estate planning: someone trusted can help pay bills, and the money will pass to that child without fuss. The trouble is what “joint owner” legally means. A co-owner is not a helper standing by, but a full owner…
A credit freeze is one of the few fraud defenses that is completely free, available to anyone, and hard for a thief to work around. It tells the three national credit bureaus to keep a person’s credit report locked, so a lender checking that report before approving a new loan or card sees a closed…
Precious-metals dealers spend heavily to pitch gold and silver as the one thing that will keep a retirement nest egg safe when everything else looks shaky. The metal itself is real, but the sales pitch usually is not the whole story. Federal and state regulators warn that many of these deals bury steep commissions and…
A federal court in Texas is weighing whether to approve a proposed $177 million settlement that would resolve claims from two AT&T data breaches, and until it rules, no payments will go out. The agreement, tied to incidents that exposed the personal information of tens of millions of current and former AT&T customers, would let…
Advertisements offering “cash now” for structured-settlement or annuity payments make a simple-sounding proposition: hand over a stream of future checks and receive a single lump sum today. What the ads rarely make plain is the exchange rate. The lump sum is almost always worth far less than the payments being surrendered, and once the paperwork…
Tens of billions of dollars in forgotten money sit in state government accounts across the country, waiting for the rightful owners to claim it. That pool includes dormant bank accounts, uncashed paychecks, old insurance payouts, utility deposits, and the contents of abandoned safe deposit boxes. Businesses are legally required to turn these assets over to…
The Federal Trade Commission is putting checks in the mail to thousands of consumers who paid an online marketer for facemasks and other protective gear during the pandemic and, in many cases, got nothing close to what they ordered. The company, Trend Deploy, promised fast shipment of N95 masks and other personal protective equipment at…
Workers who signed up to clean homes and run errands through the app Handy, expecting the paydays its ads promised, are now receiving checks from the Federal Trade Commission after regulators concluded those earnings claims did not hold up. The agency says it is returning more than $2.7 million to people who worked on the…
The Federal Trade Commission has begun sending a fresh wave of refunds to people who paid the personal-finance app Brigit for cash advances that regulators say were far less “instant” than advertised. According to the agency, more than a million payments are going out in this round, drawn from an $18 million settlement the company…