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The Money Overview

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Tyler Foster

Latest Articles by Tyler Foster

Bank Accounts & Fees

Big banks still pay about 0.4% on savings while online banks pay near 4% — leaving the same $10,000 earning $360 less every year

Big banks still pay about 0.4% on savings while online banks pay near 4% — leaving the same $10,000 earning $360 less every year Put...

Fraud & Scams

See every piece of mail before it arrives with free USPS Informed Delivery — it flags stolen checks and new-card envelopes before a thief beats you to them

In late 2023, a Cincinnati letter carrier was walking her route when 19-year-old Lamarion Gray put a gun to her and stole her master mailbox...

Retirement Planning

Earning too much to fund a Roth IRA doesn’t actually lock you out — a “backdoor” contribution is legal and most high earners don’t use it

Every April, high-earning Americans file their taxes, glance at the Roth IRA section, and skip it. They assume their income disqualifies them. For 2025, the...

Retirement Planning

A 1% fee on your 401(k) can quietly cost six figures over a career — yet most savers have never checked their funds’ expense ratios

Somewhere inside your 401(k) account, a number you have probably never looked at is shaving money off your retirement balance every single day. It is...

Retirement Planning

Old 401(k)s from past jobs often sit in high-fee default funds — rolling them into a low-cost IRA can save tens of thousands over time

Somewhere in the records of a former employer’s retirement plan, $30,000 is quietly losing a race against fees. If that balance sits in a default...

Fraud & Scams

You can stop the preapproved credit offers scammers steal from mailboxes — opting out at OptOutPrescreen is free and cuts your identity-theft risk

A preapproved credit card offer sitting in an unlocked mailbox looks like junk mail to the person who lives there. To a thief walking the...

Retirement Planning

The beneficiary form on your 401(k) and IRA overrides your will — an outdated one can send your savings to an ex instead of your family

In 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court settled a case that still catches divorcing Americans off guard. A DuPont employee had split from his wife, and...

Fraud & Scams

A retiree moved her life savings to a “safe account” on a caller’s orders — and lost all $740,000 to scammers posing as her bank and a federal agent

The first call came with a simple warning: your bank account has been compromised. A recently retired woman did what most people would do. She...

Loans & Lending

Companies charging hundreds to “lower” your student loans are selling what the government does free — real help lives at studentaid.gov

A borrower gets a call, a text, or a social-media ad promising lower monthly payments on their federal student loans. The pitch sounds official. The...

Cost of Living

Many states will knock hundreds off your property-tax or rent bill through a “circuit breaker” rebate — but you have to file, and most never do

A 70-year-old renter in Springfield, Missouri, paying $900 a month could get back up to $1,100 from the state this year. A retired homeowner in...

Budgeting & Saving

Americans are sitting on $29 billion in U.S. savings bonds that quietly stopped earning interest — and a free Treasury site finds yours by Social Security number

A savings bond your grandmother slipped into a birthday card in 1987 hit its 30-year maturity in 2017, stopped earning interest that same month, and...

Smart Spending

Hospitals routinely overcharge — request an itemized bill, and you can dispute the errors that studies find on most of them

Picture a three-night hospital stay for a broken ankle. The summary bill arrives: $47,000. But when the patient calls the billing department and asks for...

Fraud & Scams

Switch on real-time transaction alerts and a card lock in your bank’s app — you’ll catch fraud in seconds instead of on next month’s statement

In late May 2026, fraud investigators continue to see the same pattern play out: a thief tests a stolen debit card with a small charge,...

Fraud & Scams

Anyone who got a Fidelity data-breach notice in 2024 can claim up to $5,000 from a settlement — the deadline to file is July 27

Roughly 120,000 Fidelity Investments customers learned in late 2024 that their personal data had been stolen. If you were one of them, a class action...

Fraud & Scams

Check washing is surging — thieves fish envelopes out of USPS mailboxes and rewrite the payee, so pay digitally or use gel-ink pens

In one case that illustrates the human cost, a Rhode Island man stood in federal court earlier this year and admitted he had used a...

IRS & Enforcement

Scammers are filing tax returns under stolen Social Security numbers — but a free six-digit IRS PIN locks them out, and any taxpayer can request one

Last filing season, thousands of Americans discovered they had been robbed before they even knew anything was wrong. They sat down to e-file their federal...

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