Vol. 1, No. 61
Topic
Personal Finance is American Courant's section for practical reporting on the household balance sheet. The questions we try to answer are the ones that show up at the kitchen table: what's happening to mortgage rates, what just changed about Medicare or Medicaid, how an Affordable Care Act premium subsidy actually works, what a tax-policy shift means for take-home pay, what a new Fed decision does to credit cards and savings yields. We cover housing finance, healthcare costs, retirement accounts and Social Security, taxes, insurance, student loans, and the financial-services firms that intermediate all of it.
We avoid hot-stock punditry, "you should absolutely buy this" advice, and the breathless tone of much retail-finance content. The point is durable judgment, not next-week trades. Where a personal-finance story is really driven by federal policy, we cross-link to politics; where it depends on a corporate or market event, we cross-link to business and economy; where it touches health coverage specifically, see health.
We try to cite the underlying source — the actual IRS bulletin, the actual HHS or CMS rule, the actual Fed minutes, the actual SSA notice, the actual Treasury or Education Department announcement — so readers can verify what we're saying and act on it with their own circumstances in mind.
On July 1, a new rule lets the Education Secretary strip loan forgiveness from workers whose employers have a 'substantial illegal purpose.' The vague standard is a tool every future administration inherits.
For two years the message to households carrying debt or waiting to borrow was simple: hold on, the cuts are coming. On June 17 the Fed quietly retired that promise. Plan for higher-for-longer instead.
The Education Department is quadrupling its autopay discount to a full point starting July 1 — but borrowers must enroll by September 30 to lock it in.
