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The Money Overview

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Tyler Foster

Latest Articles by Tyler Foster

Mortgages & Rates

You don’t have to use the title company your lender picks — shopping your own title insurance and closing services can cut hundreds off the bill

Picture this: you are three weeks from closing on a $400,000 house, buried in paperwork, and your lender emails you the name of a title...

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The beneficiary form on your 401(k) and IRA overrides your will — an outdated one can send your savings to an ex instead of your family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

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