The financial news that actually matters
Missing the window to enroll in Medicare Part B is one of the few mistakes in retirement that keeps costing money for the rest of a person’s life. Sign up after the deadline without qualifying coverage in the meantime, and Medicare tacks a surcharge onto the monthly premium that generally never comes off. The penalty…
A new type of tax-advantaged savings account for children now has a path for employers to help fund it. The Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service released proposed regulations this month spelling out how a company can contribute to a worker’s Trump Account without adding to the worker’s taxable income. The headline figure is…
Many older Americans assume a carefully drafted will decides who inherits everything they leave behind. For two of the largest assets most households own, that assumption is wrong. Retirement accounts and life-insurance policies pay whoever is named on their beneficiary form, and the instructions written into a will almost never touch them. That quiet gap…
For retirees who give to charity and also face required withdrawals from a traditional retirement account, the tax code offers a maneuver that accomplishes both at once. By sending money straight from an individual retirement account to a qualified charity, an eligible retiree can cover a required distribution without the amount ever landing on the…
Among the levers a retiree can pull, few are as powerful or as predictable as simply waiting to claim Social Security. For anyone who has reached full retirement age but has not yet filed, the monthly benefit keeps growing on its own, month after month, until age 70. That built-in increase is one of the…
A federal jury in Kansas City has convicted a Missouri woman of draining more than $66,000 in Social Security benefits meant for her mother, who was living in Cuba with dementia while the money was quietly redirected to the daughter’s own spending. The verdict, returned this week, is a stark illustration of how easily benefits…
A tax that once touched only a sliver of retirees now reaches a majority of them, and the reason is a set of income thresholds that Congress wrote decades ago and never updated. Depending on total income, as much as 85 percent of a retiree’s Social Security benefit can be subject to federal income tax….
One of the most misunderstood rules in Social Security catches retirees who claim their benefit early and keep drawing a paycheck. For anyone below full retirement age, the Social Security Administration temporarily holds back part of the monthly benefit once earnings from a job cross a yearly threshold. The mechanics feel like a penalty in…
A retirement account can be drained by an offer that sounds too good to refuse, and federal prosecutors say thousands of investors learned that the hard way. The alleged operator of a $165 million cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme has been deported from Fiji and now faces federal fraud charges in Georgia, ending a year on the…
A retiree’s Social Security check is supposed to be one of the most protected sources of income in American life, but for older Americans carrying old student debt it is not untouchable. A new proposal in the Senate aims to change that. Sen. Bernie Sanders has announced the Stop Social Security Garnishment Act of 2026,…
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