The financial news that actually matters
Few parts of the tax code do more quiet good for ordinary families than the rule that governs an inherited house. A home a parent bought decades ago for a fraction of today’s price would seem to carry an enormous built-in capital gain. Yet an heir who inherits that house and sells it shortly afterward…
It sounds like a tidy shortcut. An aging parent adds an adult child to the deed of the family home, figuring it will make things simpler when the time comes and spare everyone the trouble of probate. What the move actually does is hand a stranger to the transaction — the child’s creditors — a…
Probate has a reputation among older homeowners for a reason: it can tie up a house for months, run up court and legal costs, and put a family’s most valuable asset in limbo at the worst possible time. For real estate in particular, a growing number of states offer a way around it that is…
A power of attorney is meant to be an act of trust: a parent names someone to handle money and bills if illness or age makes it hard to do so alone. In the right hands it is one of the most useful documents a family can have. In the wrong ones, it is a…
To a retiree staring at a drained checking account, the cruelest detail of a payment scam is often the same one the con artist was counting on. Money moved by bank wire or through a real-time app such as Zelle behaves much more like handing over an envelope of cash than swiping a credit card….
Most class-action settlements ask the people they benefit to do something: find the notice, file a claim, meet a deadline. A proposed $11 million deal over an obscure charge buried in certain life-insurance policies is built differently. If a judge signs off next month, eligible policyholders would receive refund checks automatically, with no form to…
The person a company trusts with its books is the same person best positioned to cook them. That uncomfortable truth ran through a federal sentencing in Arizona, where a longtime finance director was sent to prison for quietly bleeding more than $10 million out of the employer that relied on him to guard its money….
The moment a deposited check turns into spendable money in an account feels like proof the check was good. It is not. Banking law draws a sharp line between when funds become available and when a check has truly settled, and a check can be reversed long after the money appeared to be in hand….
An identity-theft victim’s hardest task is often simply proving what was stolen. The records that show which account was opened, what was ordered, and where it shipped sit inside the retailer’s systems, and getting them released can decide whether a police report goes anywhere. A federal order against Amazon has now made clear that handing…
Cash that a brokerage customer leaves uninvested does not simply sit there. It is swept into a bank deposit program that earns interest, and how much of that interest reaches the customer has become one of the most closely watched disputes in the investment industry. Oppenheimer & Co. has now agreed to pay $70 million…
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