Mortgage rates
The 30-year mortgage rate holds at 7.40 percent
Freddie Mac reports an unchanged 30-year fixed mortgage average, compared with 6.27 percent a year earlier. The 15-year average edged down to 6.71 percent from 6.73 percent.
Your Money
Personal Finance
Mortgage rates
-
Personal Finance · Household wealth
U.S. median family net worth rose 2 percent as under-35 wealth fell 23 percent
Real median family net worth rose 2 percent to $215,900 from 2022 to 2025, the Fed found. Median wealth fell 23 percent for families younger than 35 and rose 37 percent for those older than 75.
-
Personal Finance · Housing
Florida says a milestone inspection with no repair recommendations cannot pause condo reserves
Florida's condominium regulator says a milestone inspection with no recommended repairs does not authorize an association to pause or reduce structural reserve funding.
-
SW Florida
Marco Island's median home is $896,300. Most owners owe no mortgage.
Marco Island has no official city cost index. Federal data put median gross rent at $1,990 and median home value at $896,300, while nearly half of all housing units are reserved for seasonal use. Current city tax and utility schedules add the local charges.
-
Personal Finance · Medicare
CMS sets mandatory global-price test for selected Medicare Part B drugs from April 2027
CMS finalized a mandatory Medicare Part B drug-pricing model using international benchmarks. The five-year performance period starts April 1, 2027.
-
Personal Finance · Trump accounts
Treasury automatically enrolls more than 60 million children in Trump Accounts
Treasury says it completed automatic enrollment for Trump Accounts, leaving more than 60 million additional eligible children with accounts that a parent or guardian can claim.
-
Personal Finance · Housing
Florida's condo reserve rule takes effect with mandatory SIRS funding forms
Florida's amended condominium reserve rule takes effect October 4. Mandatory forms will record each SIRS funding method and whether it leads to an assessment or borrowing.
-
Personal Finance · Medicare
CMS finalizes Part B drug model covering 25 percent of Original Medicare
CMS finalized a mandatory drug-payment model using international prices in selected Part B rebate calculations. It will cover about 25 percent of Original Medicare beneficiaries and may lower cost sharing from April 2027.
-
SW Florida
Bonita Springs has 14,563 vacant homes. Most are not available.
Bonita Springs has no official city cost index. Federal city data put median gross rent at $1,882 and median home value at $497,100, while seasonal use accounts for 81.6 percent of vacant homes. Local millage and utility rates show costs that the Lee County price level cannot.
-
Personal Finance · Mortgages
HUD raises the Section 184 upfront mortgage guarantee fee to 1.50 percent from October 1
HUD will raise the upfront guarantee fee on new Section 184 firm commitments, including refinances, from 1.00 to 1.50 percent on October 1. Existing guarantees are unaffected and the annual fee stays at zero.
-
Personal Finance · Mortgages
The 30-year mortgage rate crosses 7 percent, rising eight basis points to 7.03 percent
Freddie Mac's average 30-year fixed mortgage rate rose to 7.03 percent from 6.95 percent. The 15-year average climbed 16 basis points to 6.42 percent this week.
-
Personal Finance · Housing
Florida court vacates $66,704 condo special-assessment award over missing counterclaim
A Florida appeals court vacated a $66,704.03 condominium special-assessment award because the association had not pleaded a claim for the money. The underlying account dispute remains open.
-
SW Florida
Florida leaves retirement income alone. The local tax bill does not.
Florida has no personal income tax, so retirement income is not taxed by the state. In Southwest Florida, retirees still face federal income-tax rules, locally variable property taxes, a 6 percent state sales tax and, in Lee County, a 0.5 percent county surtax.
-
SW Florida
Cape Coral’s $1,998 rent tells a different story from the metro average
Cape Coral has no official citywide cost index. The federal metro price level was 102.3 in 2024, but city median gross rent was $1,998, 6.8 percent above Lee County. Owners face a different equation shaped by mortgage status, property taxes, utility connections and annual city assessments.
-
Personal Finance · Mortgages
The 30-year mortgage rate rises 19 basis points to 6.95 percent
Freddie Mac's average 30-year fixed mortgage rate rose to 6.95 percent from 6.76 percent last week. The 15-year average increased to 6.26 percent from 6.09 percent.
-
Personal Finance · Federal benefits
OPM asks whether federal health plans should offer more choices and face a premium ceiling
OPM is reviewing the three-option limit for federal employee health plans and asking whether high-premium offerings should be removed. The request starts a policy review but makes no immediate coverage changes.
-
Personal Finance · Student loans
New federal undergraduate student loans carry a 6.52 percent rate through June 2027
Federal undergraduate loans first disbursed from July 2026 through June 2027 carry a 6.52 percent fixed rate. Graduate unsubsidized loans are 8.07 percent and PLUS loans are 9.07 percent.
-
Personal Finance · Household bills
New Jersey approves higher water rates and a $9.88 monthly PFAS credit
New Jersey American Water rates rise September 15 after regulators approved a $68m annual revenue increase. Eligible water customers will receive a separate $9.88 monthly PFAS settlement credit for 12 months.
-
Personal Finance · Housing
Florida's condo reserve-study databases now list 8,961 distinct association names
Florida's two public SIRS databases contain 8,961 distinct normalized association names. The count is useful for lookup, but it is not a statewide compliance rate.
-
Personal Finance · Housing vouchers
A price index the Bureau of Labor Statistics stopped publishing has changed how HUD sets the rent ceiling for every voucher in the country
HUD filed its FY 2027 Fair Market Rents notice on August 31, effective October 1. The utility half of the inflation factor is now built from state level Energy Information Administration prices instead of a discontinued local CPI.
-
Personal Finance · Retirement
One dollar of income, $1,148 of Medicare premium
The Medicare income surcharge is not a percentage of anything. It is a step, set by a tax return filed two years ago, and crossing a threshold by a single dollar moves a couple's combined premium by more than $2,290 a year. The number of people paying it rose by a million in 2026.
-
Personal Finance · Social Security
Social Security has withdrawn the 1990 ruling that governed how rental subsidies count against SSI, and the withdrawal changes nothing for anyone
AR 90-2(2) carried the Second Circuit's decision in Ruppert v. Bowen into agency practice from 1990. A 2024 final rule wrote the same standard into the regulation nationwide, which leaves the ruling obsolete.
-
Personal Finance · Passports
The State Department wants Americans abroad to renew passports online, and of the $148.7m a year it counts as the benefit, $19m is calculated on them
The proposed rule would end the two in-person consular visits and drop the requirement that a passport have a year or less left to run. State puts the yearly saving at $148,685,935.
-
Personal Finance · Retirement
Four funds, four clocks, and the deadline that arrives first
Search the phrase and the first page of results returns 2032, 2033 and 2034 as the year Social Security runs out of money. All three appear in the 2026 Trustees Reports, and each belongs to a different trust fund. The government publishes a fourth date, in a separate letter sent to Congress on the same morning, and that one falls in 2031.
-
Economics
The forecast was the first thing they gave up
Six people describe what global economic conditions changed about their decisions. None of them changed a forecast. Every one changed the structure of a commitment instead, and the Federal Reserve publishes the error table that explains why.
-
Personal Finance · Retirement plans
The Labor Department has spent almost six years clearing a Puerto Rico 401(k) plan's sale of stock rights that raised $6,550.33 for its members
Prohibited transaction exemption 2026-07 is in effect from 10 to 16 September 2020. It covers the Liberty Puerto Rico 401(k) Savings Plan holding and selling rights to buy Liberty Latin America shares.
-
Personal Finance · Retirement plans
A 401(k) saver suing over her employer's fund switch does not have to find a matching fund to compare it with, the Eleventh Circuit has ruled
The Eleventh Circuit reversed summary judgment for Royal Caribbean in a suit over its retirement plan. An ERISA plaintiff need not produce an apples-to-apples comparator fund to show an investment was objectively imprudent.
-
Personal Finance · Payments
The rate was set by whoever was holding the last screen
Four people who move money across borders describe losing it in the same place: a conversion somebody else priced, found later at reconciliation rather than at the till.
-
Personal Finance · Retirement
The law gives everyone born in 1959 two different RMD ages, and nobody has fixed it
Section 401(a)(9)(C)(v) sets the age at which retirement withdrawals become compulsory. Read as written, it assigns people born in 1959 an age of both 73 and 75. Treasury says so itself, in a footnote, and the paragraph of the regulation that would settle it is blank.
-
Personal Finance · Railroad retirement
The Railroad Retirement Board has called a second part of its rulebook facially unlawful, and this one decides whether the Board or Social Security pays a railroad worker
The old text sent employees with under ten years of service, and divorced spouses, to the Social Security Administration. The statute stopped saying that in 2001 and, for divorced spouses, in 1981.
-
Personal Finance · Railroad retirement
The Railroad Retirement Board has called part of its own rulebook facially unlawful, and the earnings figure inside it has been wrong since 2007
The Board's regulation still capped a disability annuitant's outside earnings at $400 a month, a figure Congress replaced in 2007. The statutory limit for 2026 is $1,320. A rule filed Friday fixes it without asking for comment.
-
Personal Finance · Retirement
Treasury will pay a retirement match of up to $1,000 from the 2027 tax year, and the notice issued on Friday says the money can only reach an IRA whose provider has registered with the government
Notice 2026-48 sets out how the SECURE 2.0 Saver's Match will be claimed. It runs on a new Form 8880-A, requires an IRA tracking number issued to a registered provider, and takes comments until 5 October.
-
Personal Finance · Medicare
Social Security will run 125,000 federal pension payment records against 111 million Medicare records to test who really qualifies for the drug cost subsidy
A matching program filed on Thursday lets the Office of Personnel Management hand Social Security civil service annuity payment data to check self-certified eligibility for Extra Help. It runs 18 months.
-
Personal Finance · Transportation
The FAA proposes to delete the list of what an airliner medical kit must contain and require instead that it cover nine conditions, with naloxone named as an option rather than an item
Appendix A would be removed and reserved. The model list of drugs and equipment moves into an advisory circular that the FAA describes as one way, but not the only way, to comply.
-
Personal Finance · Transportation
A large American carrier asked the Transportation Department for relief from annual wheelchair training, and the department has paused enforcement of five provisions until April 2027
The pause covers airline liability for mishandled wheelchairs, refresher training, pre-departure notifications and fare difference reimbursements, and now the onboard wheelchair training rule due to take effect on 2 October.
-
Personal Finance · Regulation
The deadline to comment on scrapping the rule that puts taxes inside an advertised airfare was Friday, and it is now 21 August
The Transportation Department extended the comment period on its airfare advertising proposal by 21 days, after requests from Airlines for America, Southwest and the Travel Technology Association.
-
Personal Finance · Estate and gift tax
The estate tax runs through twelve rate brackets. Every dollar it collected in 2023 came out of the twelfth.
Every federal estate tax exemption and top rate from 1916 to 2026, in nominal dollars and in constant 2025 dollars. The exemption has been cut outright twice. Inflation has cut it far more often, and the longest freeze did more to widen the tax than any statute did.
-
Personal Finance · Savings
Bessent says 7 million children are enrolled in Trump Accounts, and puts 86 percent of them in families earning under $200,000
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave the first enrollment figure for Trump Accounts in remarks to the Financial Literacy and Education Commission on July 27, 2026, published by Treasury as prepared for delivery.
-
SW Florida
Collier County pays $1,328 a year for flood insurance. FEMA has priced the risk at $3,195
The median single-family flood policy in force in Collier County on 27 July 2026 costs $1,328 a year, and in Lee County $1,757, computed from FEMA's own policy file. FEMA's published full-risk figures for the same two counties are $3,195.08 and $3,794.90. The gap is the subsidy, it is being closed by statute at up to 18 percent a year, and Collier's is the widest of any large county in Florida.
-
SW Florida
The amendment is called Save Our Homes. It leaves Save Our Homes exactly as it was.
Amendment 3 on the November 3 ballot raises the non-school homestead exemption to $150,000 in 2027 and $250,000 in 2028, and cuts the assessment cap on non-homestead property from 10 percent to 5 percent. It does not touch the 1992 Save Our Homes cap that gives it its name. State economists put the recurring cost at $11.8 billion a year, including $203 million in Collier County and $453 million in Lee.
-
Personal Finance · Retirement
How the Social Security COLA is calculated, and why the official projection is already behind the data
The cost-of-living adjustment is not a policy decision. It is an arithmetic operation on three monthly numbers that have not been published yet. The Trustees assumed 2.7 percent for the raise arriving next January, and on the last index reading before the measurement window opened, 2.7 percent would require prices to fall.
-
SW Florida
In Southwest Florida a condo's milestone inspection is a state requirement, but whether the clock starts at 25 years or 30 is a local decision.
Florida Statute 553.899 makes a structural milestone inspection mandatory for condominium and cooperative buildings three habitable stories or taller once they reach 30 years of age. Coastal counties may pull that trigger forward to 25 years, and Collier County has. The first two years of statewide data show where the real cost lands, and it is not the inspection.
-
SW Florida
In Southwest Florida the homestead exemption is the small tax break. Save Our Homes is the one worth keeping when you move.
Florida's homestead exemption and its Save Our Homes assessment cap are different benefits, and in a high-growth market like Collier County the cap is usually the larger one. Portability lets you carry that cap to a new home, up to $500,000 of it, if you move within three years.
-
SW Florida
The 115 percent cap that Florida condo owners keep citing does not cover the three things raising their bills
Florida law makes a board propose a substitute budget when assessments rise more than 15 percent. The statute then excludes reserves, structural items and insurance from that calculation. Those are the three costs actually driving condo budgets in Collier and Lee.
-
SW Florida
You moved to Naples for the zero income tax. Your old state gets a vote, and it counts your days.
Florida has no income tax. Leaving a high-tax state cleanly is harder than moving. The line is 184 days, any part of a day counts, and states like New York audit the wealthy who cross it.
-
Personal Finance
A 10-year TIPS matured today after paying a 0.045% real yield
Bought at auction in July 2016, it returned 3.381% a year in nominal terms. The nominal note sold beside it yielded 1.59%.
-
Finance
Mortgage lending rose about 30 percent at the three biggest US bank originators
Chase originated $17.2bn, Wells Fargo $9bn and Bank of America $3.5bn in first mortgages in the second quarter.
-
Economics
Consumer prices fell 0.4 percent in June as energy costs dropped
Annual CPI inflation slowed to 3.5 percent, from 4.2 percent in May. Core CPI was flat on the month.
-
Tax
Treasury finalizes rules making some charitable trust deals listed transactions
Final regulations require participants and material advisers to disclose certain CRAT and annuity arrangements.
-
Tax
Tax Court denies above-the-line deduction for credit reporting legal fees
FCRA claims do not involve unlawful discrimination under section 62(a)(20), the Tax Court held in Eiler.
-
Personal Finance
Four groups lose charitable status, and gifts to them stop being deductible
Announcement 2026-12 revokes four section 501(c)(3) determinations, with effective dates going back to 2022.
-
Tax
IRS to grant penalty relief automatically to compliant taxpayers
The IRS will abate three common penalties without a request from taxpayers who have three clean years behind them.
-
Tax
IRS raises business mileage rate to 76 cents for the second half of 2026
The business standard mileage rate rises to 76 cents from 72.5 cents for travel on or after July 1.
-
Personal Finance · Tax
IRS removes a death benefit tax trap from life insurance policy swaps
Final rules undo a 2019 regulation that could have made a death benefit taxable after a routine 1035 exchange.
-
Personal Finance · Tax
Lawyers warn NYC second-home buyers could inherit a seller's pied-a-terre tax bill
The surcharge took effect July 1. The rules that say who owes it are still in draft.
-
Personal Finance · Tax
World Cup bets may be taxed differently on prediction markets than at a sportsbook
Sportsbook losses face a new 90 percent deduction cap. Event contracts may sit outside it. The IRS has not ruled.
-
Tax
IRS moves QDOT bond filings out of the estate tax return
Final regulations under section 2056A change where QDOT bonds and letters of credit must be filed.
-
Personal Finance · Retirement
Social Security COLA estimates for 2027 drop to between 3.7 and 3.8 percent
Cooler June inflation cut one 2027 estimate to 3.7 percent, from 4.7 percent a month earlier.
-
Personal Finance
The Tax Court is weighing whether COVID stopped interest on old tax debt
Wepplo asks whether section 7508A(d) barred interest from accruing between January 2020 and July 2023.
-
Personal Finance · Retirement
Trump accounts opened on July 4 with one fund and no choice yet
Treasury named five ETFs on July 1. Every contribution goes into the default until the other four are switched on.
-
Personal Finance · Retirement
SSI recipients get two payments in July and none in August
August 1 is a Saturday, so the August payment lands on July 31. It is a calendar rule, not a raise.
Nothing filed under that subtopic yet.