What’s the fastest liquid on the planet?

Milk. It’s pasteurized before you even see it.

Now Let’s Make Your Money Smile

Somebody had to let that scam charge your card. On Thursday the FTC fined them $4.85 million

Here’s a thing most people never think about, and it changes what you do when it happens to you.

When a scam takes money off your credit card, the money doesn’t travel straight from you to some anonymous crook overseas. It can’t. To charge a Visa or a Mastercard, you need a payment processor — a real, regulated, named company that agrees to run your transactions. Every fake “your computer is infected” popup that ever got paid, got paid because a company in the middle opened an account for the people behind it.

On Thursday the FTC went after one of those middlemen. Global processor Nuvei agreed to pay $4.85 million and to actually screen who it does business with, to settle charges that it opened and kept accounts for merchants it “knew or should have known” were running deceptions.

The number that stopped me: the FTC alleges Nuvei processed more than $30 million in consumer payments for a single offshore tech support scam called Reimage — from 2017 to 2023. Six years. The complaint also says it took on merchants selling business opportunities with baseless earnings claims, and merchants impersonating government tax authorities. These are allegations in a complaint and a settlement, not a court finding of guilt.

So why does this matter to you and not just to lawyers? Because it tells you where the leverage is. If your father paid $299 to somebody who called about his computer, the instinct is to feel foolish and let it go — the crook is gone, what’s the point. But the crook was never the only party. There is a processor, and a bank, and a card network, and every one of them has rules about this and a federal agency currently paying attention. That is why you dispute the charge with your card issuer instead of writing it off. You are not chasing the scammer. You are telling the one company in the chain that has an address and a regulator.

Forward this to whoever in your family answers the phone to unknown numbers. If somebody ever paid a “tech support” charge and never disputed it because they assumed the money was gone — it went through a processor like this one, and that is exactly the charge that gets reversed when you actually call the card company.

The FTC is mailing out money right now, and people are throwing it away

This is the part that always gets me. When the FTC wins one of these cases, it sends the money back — actual paper checks and PayPal payments to actual people. Refunds went out in August alone for AT&T data throttling, Grubhub, Amazon Flex drivers, Helping America Group and Blueprint to Wealth.

You don’t apply for most of these. If you were in the case, they find you. Which is precisely the problem: an unexpected check arrives from a company you half-remember, it looks exactly like every sweepstakes scam you’ve been warned about, and into the bin it goes.

Two things worth knowing. FTC refund checks usually expire — commonly 90 days — and after that you are asking for a reissue you may not get. And the FTC never asks you to pay a fee or hand over your bank details to claim one. If someone does ask, that is the scam, and the real refund page above is how you check.

Go look at that list. The FTC names the cases and the administrator handling each one on its own refund page — so if one of those names is a company you actually dealt with, that is the envelope you do not want to bin.

Six million bottles of household cleaner, recalled Friday

Quick one, and it is the kind of thing that pays for itself.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission announced Friday that Clorox Puerto Rico is recalling about 6 million bottles of scented Mistolin and Lestoil multi-purpose cleaners over the risk of bacteria in the product. Six million is not a niche batch — that is a bottle under a lot of kitchen sinks.

Here is the money part people skip. A recall is a refund. You are entitled to a remedy from the company, and for a consumable like this that normally means your money back, usually without the receipt. Most people read a recall headline, think “I should check that sometime,” and never do, which means the manufacturer keeps money that was supposed to come back to you.

Two minutes: look under the sink, check the full CPSC recall list while you’re at it, and if you have a bottle, stop using it and file for the refund.

What I published

• A Medical Bill Went to Collections and Nobody Warned Me. Here’s What to Do Right Now.

• Can Debt Collectors Take VA Disability? What I Tell Veterans When the Truck Dies

• The Car Loan Interest Deduction Is Real — But Dealers Are Already Using It to Sell You More Car

For the deeper dives — company reviews, full case breakdowns, the stuff that needs more than a paragraph — that’s what the Weekday Briefing is for. This one’s the quick version, every day. If today’s issue was useful, pass it along.

Nothing here is legal advice, and I’m not your lawyer or your financial advisor. These are filings and allegations, not findings — read “alleges” as exactly that. Talk to someone qualified before you act on anything specific to your situation.

Something I want you to take out of today. Every story up there has a company in the middle of it — a processor, a card issuer, an agency with a refund list. When you are the one who got taken, it feels like you against a ghost, and ghosts can’t be argued with. But there is almost always somebody real in that chain with a name, a rulebook and a phone number. Thirty years of this and the pattern holds: the money comes back to the people who make one uncomfortable phone call, not to the people who were cleverest about it. Make the call. I’ll see you tomorrow.

— Steve

Bonus Section

A few places I actually use, and what I get out of telling you. Each one shows a plain link and my referral link. If you use mine, the company may hand us both a small bonus. The plain link goes to exactly the same place — it just pays me nothing, and you nothing. Use whichever you like; genuinely, it’s your call.

I’ve also listed places I like that pay me nothing at all, so you can see the difference.

Cash that actually earns something

Betterment — their Cash Reserve account is the closest thing here to a plain high-yield savings account. (my referral link)

Robinhood’s cash sweep pays competitively too. The good rate sits behind their paid Gold tier — I pay for it myself — so on a small balance the subscription can eat the gain. It’s under Investing below. Do the arithmetic before you subscribe.

And one where nobody pays anybody: TreasuryDirect is the government’s own site. You buy Treasury bills straight from the Treasury with no broker in the middle — $100 minimum, in $100 increments, terms from four weeks out to a year. There is no app, no bonus and no referral link in existence for it. I mention it because for money you know you won’t touch for a few months, it’s usually the honest number the others have to beat.

Saving without having to think about it

Acorns — rounds up your spare change and invests it automatically. I pay for it, and the reason is simple: it saves money I’d otherwise spend without noticing. (my referral link)

And the version that costs nobody anything, me included: a standing transfer out of checking on payday, at the bank you already have. Acorns works because it moves the money before you notice it; a transfer you set once and forget does the same thing. If you’d rather not open another account, do that instead — I’d genuinely rather you saved something than used my link.

Investing

Robinhood — the platform I run my own experiment on. Uninvested cash is swept to FDIC-insured program banks, so it doubles as a cash account. The competitive rate requires their paid Gold subscription, which I pay for myself — worth it at my balance, but do the arithmetic on yours. And note Robinhood doesn’t pay that interest itself; the program banks do. (my referral link)

And three I recommend on merit, where I get nothing at all: Vanguard for low-cost index funds, Schwab for a full-service brokerage, and American Century — I was a happy customer there for decades.

Rates and terms move, and each of these has its own conditions. Go look at today’s numbers before you move a dollar.

A free conversation about your situation

Damon Day is an independent debt coach, and my co-host on Get Out of Debt Guy — you can also hear us on Spotify. I want you to know that before you decide anything. I receive no payment for this referral.

The consultation is free. The only time money changes hands is if you decide you want to hire him as a consultant. Go to DamonDay.com and schedule — he doesn’t cold-call anybody, and neither do I.

Or ask me, anonymously

Ask Steve — free, private, and I’m not selling anything. No account, no email, no sales pitch at the end of it.

Why did the scarecrow win an award?

Because he was outstanding in his field.

Now Let’s Make Your Money Smile

You can stop an IRS interview cold — even after you’ve started answering

Two IRS items this week, and I’ll tell you why. Wednesday I wrote about penalty abatement being a free phone call. This week the IRS’s own watchdog put out two reports, and one of them is about a right that I’d bet almost nobody reading this knows they have.

Here it is. If you are ever sitting in an interview with an IRS officer — an audit, a collection interview, in person — and you say clearly that you want to talk to an attorney, a CPA, or an enrolled agent, that officer has to stop the interview. Not “should.” The statute says shall suspend.

And here’s the part that surprises people. The law says they have to stop regardless of whether you have already answered one or more questions. That’s the actual language. Most people assume that once they’ve started talking, the moment has passed and it would look bad to stop now. It hasn’t, and it doesn’t. You can be forty minutes and a dozen answers into a conversation and still say the words.

You can also record it. Same statute: on advance request, at your own expense, with your own equipment, they have to let you make an audio recording of an in-person interview about determining or collecting tax. Nobody advertises that either.

I’ve sat in that chair. My own audit was so unfun that what I remember isn’t my own paperwork — it’s the person in the next cubicle, also being audited, in a wheelchair, and crying. That’s the room. It is intimidating and it is scary, and that feeling is exactly why people answer questions they were never required to answer that day. Mine happened to end with me getting more money back, which seems about as unheard of as winning the lottery and is not something I’d plan on. But I’d rather you walk in knowing what the room feels like — and knowing the one sentence that lets you stop it.

Why this is news and not just trivia: the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration — the IRS’s independent watchdog — issued its annual statutory review on August 31 and announced it Thursday. It found the agency “lacks a system to identify potential violations” of that very rule. Their sample found collection staff largely complied, but interviews with managers and employees turned up “inconsistent understanding” of several procedures — including the taxpayers’ right to record. So the rule is real, and the people applying it are not uniformly clear on it. That is exactly the situation where knowing the sentence yourself is worth something.

One honest limit: it doesn’t apply to an interview the IRS opened with an administrative summons. Everything else, it does.

If someone you know is dealing with the IRS right now, send them this one. People walk into those interviews alone because they think asking for a representative makes them look guilty, and they answer questions they didn’t have to answer that day. It’s one sentence, and they are allowed to say it after they’ve already started.

If you can’t pay, file anyway — not filing costs about ten times more

This is the one that costs people real money, and it’s backwards from what almost everyone does.

When you can’t pay a tax bill, the instinct is to not file. It feels like the same problem either way, and filing feels like raising your hand. So the return doesn’t go in.

Look at the actual arithmetic. The IRS charges a failure-to-file penalty of 5% of the tax due for each month or partial month the return is late, up to 25%. The failure-to-pay penalty is 0.5% a month. Same bill, same month, ten times the price for the missing paperwork rather than the missing money.

On $10,000 of tax, five months late: filing late and paying late runs you the full 25% file penalty in five months. Filing on time and simply not paying, over that same stretch, is a fraction of it. You do not have to have the money to file. Those are two separate obligations and only one of them requires a bank balance.

The reason it’s live right now: the same watchdog’s second report, also dated August 31 and announced Thursday, found that nearly 33,700 taxpayers had been sitting in “first notice status” more than a year into the IRS’s high-income nonfiler push — parked, with no further collection action. After TIGTA raised it, the IRS moved those cases out of that status in March. Roughly 11,000 more sat unworked in the queue. Translation: the pause a lot of nonfilers have been quietly enjoying is being cleaned up, and the cheapest day to file a late return is always the day before somebody comes looking.

Disaster giving season, and the people waiting for it

The FTC’s Military Consumer team put out a reminder this week that’s worth thirty seconds: after a hurricane, a flood, an earthquake, fake charities move fast, because they know that’s when people give without checking.

The check is easy. Give to an organization you already know by name, go to its website yourself rather than through a link in a text or a social post, and never send disaster money by gift card or wire. If someone is pressuring you to give right now, that pressure is the product.

Money you might actually be owed this month

September’s claim windows are open, and nobody is going to email you about them. Two worth a look:

• $1.01M Sportsman’s Guide data privacy settlement

• The full September list, ten of them

A word on how to read these, because the headline number is the most misleading part. A $1.01 million settlement sounds like a lot until you divide it by the class. Most of these pay out in the tens of dollars, and the honest reason to file is that it takes four minutes and the money is already set aside — not because it’s going to change your month. Check whether you’re actually in the class before you spend any time on it. Half the “you may be owed money” traffic online is people harvesting your details for a claim you were never eligible for.

The number underneath all of this

In the three days from Tuesday to today, at least 65 new federal cases were filed against the three big credit bureaus — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. I say at least and I mean it twice over: the docket system I read is federal only, so state court cases are invisible to me, and federal indexing runs a week or two behind, so the number moves after the fact.

I don’t lead with that number, because a count isn’t a story. But it is the honest backdrop. People sue the bureaus constantly, mostly over information that is wrong and stayed wrong after being disputed. If you’ve disputed something and been told it was “verified,” you are not an unusual case.

What I published

• I’m Being Evicted and Debt Collectors Are After Me at the Same Time. Here’s What I’d Do First.

• Mortgage Rates Just Hit a One-Year High — and the Fed Isn’t Talking About Cuts

On the podcast this week

Should You Stop Paying Credit Cards? — Why Banks Won’t Help Until You’re Behind

It’s the question I get more than almost any other, and the answer is genuinely uncomfortable: the system mostly doesn’t offer you anything until you’re already behind. I talk about what that means for deciding when — and whether — to stop.

For the deeper dives — company reviews, full case breakdowns, the stuff that needs more than a paragraph — that’s what the Weekday Briefing is for. This one’s the quick version, every day. If today’s issue was useful, pass it along.

Nothing here is legal advice, and I’m not your lawyer or your financial advisor. These are filings and allegations, not findings — read “alleges” as exactly that. Talk to someone qualified before you act on anything specific to your situation.

Here’s what I keep coming back to after thirty years of this. The people who get out are almost never the ones who found some clever move nobody else knew. They’re the ones who stopped looking away from it. One statute you didn’t know about, one return you finally filed, one question you asked out loud instead of carrying around — that’s what the road out is actually made of. It’s not dramatic and it works. Have a good weekend, and I’ll see you Monday.

— Steve

Bonus Section

A few places I actually use, and what I get out of telling you. Each one shows a plain link and my referral link. If you use mine, the company may hand us both a small bonus. The plain link goes to exactly the same place — it just pays me nothing, and you nothing. Use whichever you like; genuinely, it’s your call.

I’ve also listed places I like that pay me nothing at all, so you can see the difference.

Cash that actually earns something

Betterment — their Cash Reserve account is the closest thing here to a plain high-yield savings account. (my referral link)

Robinhood’s cash sweep pays competitively too. The good rate sits behind their paid Gold tier — I pay for it myself — so on a small balance the subscription can eat the gain. It’s under Investing below. Do the arithmetic before you subscribe.

And one where nobody pays anybody: TreasuryDirect is the government’s own site. You buy Treasury bills straight from the Treasury with no broker in the middle — $100 minimum, in $100 increments, terms from four weeks out to a year. There is no app, no bonus and no referral link in existence for it. I mention it because for money you know you won’t touch for a few months, it’s usually the honest number the others have to beat.

Saving without having to think about it

Acorns — rounds up your spare change and invests it automatically. I pay for it, and the reason is simple: it saves money I’d otherwise spend without noticing. (my referral link)

And the version that costs nobody anything, me included: a standing transfer out of checking on payday, at the bank you already have. Acorns works because it moves the money before you notice it; a transfer you set once and forget does the same thing. If you’d rather not open another account, do that instead — I’d genuinely rather you saved something than used my link.

Investing

Robinhood — the platform I run my own experiment on. Uninvested cash is swept to FDIC-insured program banks, so it doubles as a cash account. The competitive rate requires their paid Gold subscription, which I pay for myself — worth it at my balance, but do the arithmetic on yours. And note Robinhood doesn’t pay that interest itself; the program banks do. (my referral link)

And three I recommend on merit, where I get nothing at all: Vanguard for low-cost index funds, Schwab for a full-service brokerage, and American Century — I was a happy customer there for decades.

Rates and terms move, and each of these has its own conditions. Go look at today’s numbers before you move a dollar.

A free conversation about your situation

Damon Day is an independent debt coach, and my co-host on Get Out of Debt Guy — you can also hear us on Spotify. I want you to know that before you decide anything. I receive no payment for this referral.

The consultation is free. The only time money changes hands is if you decide you want to hire him as a consultant. Go to DamonDay.com and schedule — he doesn’t cold-call anybody, and neither do I.

Or ask me, anonymously

Ask Steve — free, private, and I’m not selling anything. No account, no email, no sales pitch at the end of it.

Did you know that “t-shirt” is actually short for “Tyrannosaurus Shirt”?

It’s because of the short arms.

Now Let’s Make Your Money Smile

Don’t scan that QR code on the parking meter

Here’s a two-minute habit that could save you a lot of grief. The FTC put out an alert today about scammers slapping their own fake QR codes right over the real ones on parking meters. You scan it thinking you’re paying for parking, and instead you land on a site built to grab your card number or your login. It works because almost nobody stops to check — the code is stuck to public equipment, so we assume it’s legit. It isn’t always.

Before you scan any QR code in public — a meter, a flyer, a “free WiFi” sign — most QR readers will preview the link first. Look at it. Misspellings or swapped letters are the tell. And keep your phone’s OS and apps updated, because that’s what turns a bad link into a bad day.

If you already scanned one and entered anything: change that password everywhere you reused it, check your card and bank statements for anything you didn’t make, and report it at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. Full FTC alert.

Send this to whoever in your life pays for parking with their phone — which by now is basically everyone. It costs them nothing to check the link first, and it costs them a lot if they don’t.

The door most people with an IRS problem don’t know they have

If you owe back taxes and things have gotten serious enough that you’ve hired someone to represent you, here’s something the IRS’s own watchdog just confirmed most people never learn: once you have representation, the IRS is required to stop contacting you directly and go through your representative instead. And if you’re ever in an interview with the IRS about your own case, you have the right to record it.

That’s not a workaround — it’s written into the Taxpayer Bill of Rights. A new report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found IRS employees don’t always apply this consistently, which is exactly why it’s worth knowing yourself instead of assuming the agency will remember for you. If you’re dealing with the IRS and feeling steamrolled, this is one of the actual levers you have.

A ten-minute upgrade for money that’s just sitting there

The FDIC’s own August numbers: the average U.S. money market account pays 0.63%. Plenty of online banks and brokerages pay 4%+ on the same FDIC insurance, for the same money, with no risk added. If your “extra” cash — an emergency fund, a house-down-payment stash, whatever you’re not touching this month — is parked at whatever the local branch defaults to, you are quietly leaving real money on the table for no reason at all. This isn’t a sales pitch for a specific bank (see the Bonus Section below if you want where I personally keep mine) — it’s ten minutes of your time against money you’re already not using.

Money you might actually be owed this month

Bought or leased a Toyota forklift with an internal combustion engine between 2007 and 2021? A $299.5M settlement over emissions compliance is paying up to $2,500 in cash, plus a free service visit and parts warranty coverage. Claim deadline: September 22. Check the specific eligibility window before you file — details here.

What I published yesterday

• A City Kept Billing Her After She Filed Bankruptcy. The Judge Said the Software Doesn’t Get to Decide That.

• IRS Penalty Abatement Is a Free Phone Call — Not a Service You Need to Buy

For the deeper dives — company reviews, full case breakdowns, the stuff that needs more than a paragraph — that’s what the Weekday Briefing is for. This one’s the quick version, every day. If today’s issue was useful, forward it to the one person you know who needed to see the QR code warning before their next parking meter.

Nothing here is legal advice, and I’m not your lawyer or your financial advisor. These are filings and allegations, not findings — read “alleges” as exactly that. Talk to someone qualified before you act on anything specific to your situation. Nobody gets to tell you what to do with your money. Not me, not anyone.

There’s a version of today where you read this and nothing changes. And there’s a version where you check one link, ask one question, or just breathe a little easier knowing what your actual options are. Most people get out of situations like these — not with a windfall, but one honest look and one decision at a time. That’s been true for thirty years and it’s still true today.

— Steve

Bonus Section

A few places I actually use, and what I get out of telling you. Each one shows a plain link and my referral link. If you use mine, the company may hand us both a small bonus. The plain link goes to exactly the same place — it just pays me nothing, and you nothing. Use whichever you like; genuinely, it’s your call.

I’ve also listed places I like that pay me nothing at all, so you can see the difference.

Cash that actually earns something

Betterment — their Cash Reserve account is the closest thing here to a plain high-yield savings account. (my referral link)

Robinhood’s cash sweep pays competitively too. The good rate sits behind their paid Gold tier — I pay for it myself — so on a small balance the subscription can eat the gain. It’s under Investing below. Do the arithmetic before you subscribe.

And one where nobody pays anybody: TreasuryDirect is the government’s own site. You buy Treasury bills straight from the Treasury with no broker in the middle — $100 minimum, in $100 increments, terms from four weeks out to a year. There is no app, no bonus and no referral link in existence for it. I mention it because for money you know you won’t touch for a few months, it’s usually the honest number the others have to beat.

Saving without having to think about it

Acorns — rounds up your spare change and invests it automatically. I pay for it, and the reason is simple: it saves money I’d otherwise spend without noticing. (my referral link)

And the version that costs nobody anything, me included: a standing transfer out of checking on payday, at the bank you already have. Acorns works because it moves the money before you notice it; a transfer you set once and forget does the same thing. If you’d rather not open another account, do that instead — I’d genuinely rather you saved something than used my link.

Investing

Robinhood — the platform I run my own experiment on. Uninvested cash is swept to FDIC-insured program banks, so it doubles as a cash account. The competitive rate requires their paid Gold subscription, which I pay for myself — worth it at my balance, but do the arithmetic on yours. And note Robinhood doesn’t pay that interest itself; the program banks do. (my referral link)

And three I recommend on merit, where I get nothing at all: Vanguard for low-cost index funds, Schwab for a full-service brokerage, and American Century — I was a happy customer there for decades.

Rates and terms move, and each of these has its own conditions. Go look at today’s numbers before you move a dollar.

A free conversation about your situation

Damon Day is an independent debt coach, and my co-host on Get Out of Debt Guy — you can also hear us on Spotify. I want you to know that before you decide anything. I receive no payment for this referral.

The consultation is free. The only time money changes hands is if you decide you want to hire him as a consultant. Go to DamonDay.com and schedule — he doesn’t cold-call anybody, and neither do I.

Or ask me, anonymously

Ask Steve — free, private, and I’m not selling anything. No account, no email, no sales pitch at the end of it.

Why can’t the skeleton play music in church?

Because they don’t have any organs.

Now Let’s Make Your Money Smile

Somebody built a fake version of a car dealership, and buyers are showing up to no car

The FTC put out an alert yesterday about something I had not seen before at this scale: scammers are impersonating car dealerships online. The FTC’s description is blunt about how it ends — you show up at the dealership and “the dealer has no record of your order or your payment. And that there’s no shiny car waiting for you.”

Sit with the shape of that for a second. This isn’t a Nigerian-prince email. It’s a professional-looking site for a real dealership that exists, in a town you can drive to, selling a car you actually want. You do the sensible thing and put money down to hold it. The money goes to a stranger.

Here’s what I’d do, and none of it is complicated. Never send a deposit to a dealership you found by clicking an ad or a search result. Look up the dealership’s phone number independently — a map listing, the manufacturer’s own dealer locator — call it, and ask a human whether your order exists. And if anyone asks for a wire transfer, a payment app, or a gift card for a car deposit, that is the end of the conversation. A real dealership takes a card. Cards can be reversed; wires and Zelle cannot, and the scammers know exactly which is which.

Forward this one to whoever in your life is car shopping right now. They are going to put down a deposit this month, from a phone, on a site they found by searching. If nobody tells them to verify the number independently first, they will find out the way the FTC describes it — standing in a real showroom, being told there is no order.

And the real dealership can take you too — that one just cost $4 million

Two weeks before that alert, the FTC and the Connecticut Attorney General settled with Manchester City Nissan for $4 million over what they alleged the dealership was doing to buyers of certified pre-owned cars. Per the complaint: advertise a certified car at a price, then charge hundreds to thousands of dollars in “inspection” fees — for the certification that was supposed to be included in the advertised price. Regulators also alleged charges like total loss protection were added without the customer agreeing to them. The money goes to the Connecticut AG for consumer redress.

Now, here’s the part almost everyone reads backwards, and it’s the reason this is in today’s issue at all.

People look at a case like this and think the fees were the crime. They weren’t. Dealerships are allowed to charge for things. The alleged violation was the advertised price — putting a number in front of you that was never the number. That distinction matters to you personally, because it tells you what to actually watch. Not “is this fee too high,” which you cannot really judge in a finance office at 7pm. But: does the price I was shown match the price on this paperwork, and if not, what changed and when did anyone tell me?

Under the settlement, the dealership now has to display the maximum total price as the most prominent item, and get express informed consent for every charge before it goes into your financing. That is a good description of what you are entitled to expect anywhere — so use it as your checklist even where no regulator has shown up yet.

Gas is 93 cents a gallon more than a year ago, and nobody announced it

I pulled AAA’s national average this morning: $4.12 for regular. A year ago it was $3.19.

That is a 93-cent jump, and it arrived so gradually that most people have absorbed it without ever doing the arithmetic. So let me do it. A household driving 12,000 miles a year in something getting 25 miles per gallon burns about 480 gallons. At 93 cents more per gallon, that is roughly $450 a year — gone, out of the same paycheck, with no decision ever made about it.

Four hundred and fifty dollars is not a catastrophe. It is also almost exactly the size of the gap that turns a budget that works into a budget that quietly doesn’t, and I have watched that specific gap start more debt spirals than I can count. Gas is the one bill you can’t opt out of. Rich or poor, you drive to work.

I’m not going to tell you to drive less; that’s useless advice. I’ll tell you the honest thing instead: if your money has felt tighter this year and you couldn’t name why, this is a real part of why, and it isn’t you being careless. Go look at what you actually spent on fuel last month versus a year ago. Knowing the number beats feeling the number.

And a practical note with a date on it: prices tend to firm up going into a holiday weekend, and Labor Day is Monday. Fill up before Friday.

Money you might actually be owed — two windows closing this month

• CRST Expedited, $14.5 million. If you drove for CRST Expedited with a California address and were paid by piece rate between August 9, 2017 and April 10, 2023, you’re in the class. No claim form — payment is automatic unless you exclude yourself, and that deadline is October 5, 2026. Details here.

• City of San Diego water rates, $40 million. Single-family residential water customers of the City of San Diego between August 14, 2014 and December 1, 2023 get a refund of the difference between what they were charged and what lawful rates would have been. No claim form to start, but you may need to confirm your contact details and pick a payment method through the administrator. The exclusion deadline is September 28, 2026. Details here.

Both of these pay out automatically, which sounds like good news and is actually the risk. Automatic means the money goes wherever the administrator has you on file — an address from 2019, a bank account you closed. If either of these is you, the ninety seconds that matter are spent making sure they can find you.

If you or someone near you just got laid off, the first 30 days decide most of it

The tech layoff numbers are moving again — Oracle is reported to be cutting up to 10,000 roles, and the tracking lists are long this year.

Here is the single most expensive mistake I see, and it happens in the first month, before anybody feels like they’re in trouble: people raid their 401(k) to stay current on credit cards.

Think about what that actually trades. You are spending retirement money — the one pot that is largely protected if things get worse — to protect a credit score. And a credit score is the thing that recovers. It rebuilds. Retirement savings you spend at 45 does not come back, because what you destroyed wasn’t the balance, it was thirty years of compounding on top of it. I’ve put the arithmetic at somewhere north of $400,000 for people who did this over a long enough stretch, and it is the quietest large loss in personal finance because nothing on any statement ever labels it.

If you’re in the first 30 days: protect the retirement account, protect the housing, protect the transportation, and let the unsecured credit be last in line. It feels wrong. It’s right. The cards are the only part of this that has a legal off-ramp built for exactly this situation.

What I published yesterday

• I Just Got a Notice of Default on My Mortgage. Here’s What to Do Right Now.

• The $117 Million Pork Price-Fixing Settlement — and what nearly every writeup got wrong

• No, You’re Not Getting $10,000 From the AMN Healthcare Settlement

• They Said My Cosigner Filing Bankruptcy Would Wipe Out My Half of the Debt Too

One more thing

If this was useful, forward it to one person. That’s the whole growth plan — no ads, nothing for sale. And if something here is happening to you right now, you can ask me directly. It’s free, it’s private, and I’m not selling anything on the other end of it.

I write a deeper Weekday Briefing over at getoutofdebt.org if you want the long version of any of this.

Nothing here is legal or financial advice for your specific situation. I’m telling you what I’d tell a friend, which is not the same as knowing your circumstances.

Look — a fake dealership, a real dealership with a fake price, and gas quietly eating four hundred and fifty dollars a year. That’s a lot of ways to lose money in one email, and I know it can read as though the whole world is set up to take from you.

It mostly isn’t. What’s true is that a handful of these things are worth knowing about, and knowing about them is nearly all of the defense. The people I’ve watched climb out of genuinely bad situations almost never did it with a windfall. They did it by looking straight at one thing they’d been avoiding, deciding one thing about it, and then doing that again the following week. That is unglamorous and it works, and there is nothing in today’s issue that changes it.

Back tomorrow.

— Steve

Bonus Section

A few places I actually use, and what I get out of telling you. Each one shows a plain link and my referral link. If you use mine, the company may hand us both a small bonus. The plain link goes to exactly the same place — it just pays me nothing, and you nothing. Use whichever you like; genuinely, it’s your call.

I’ve also listed places I like that pay me nothing at all, so you can see the difference.

Cash that actually earns something

Betterment — their Cash Reserve account is the closest thing here to a plain high-yield savings account. (my referral link)

Robinhood’s cash sweep pays competitively too. The good rate sits behind their paid Gold tier — I pay for it myself — so on a small balance the subscription can eat the gain. It’s under Investing below. Do the arithmetic before you subscribe.

And one where nobody pays anybody: TreasuryDirect is the government’s own site. You buy Treasury bills straight from the Treasury with no broker in the middle — $100 minimum, in $100 increments, terms from four weeks out to a year. There is no app, no bonus and no referral link in existence for it. I mention it because for money you know you won’t touch for a few months, it’s usually the honest number the others have to beat.

Saving without having to think about it

Acorns — rounds up your spare change and invests it automatically. I pay for it, and the reason is simple: it saves money I’d otherwise spend without noticing. (my referral link)

And the version that costs nobody anything, me included: a standing transfer out of checking on payday, at the bank you already have. Acorns works because it moves the money before you notice it; a transfer you set once and forget does the same thing. If you’d rather not open another account, do that instead — I’d genuinely rather you saved something than used my link.

Investing

Robinhood — the platform I run my own experiment on. Uninvested cash is swept to FDIC-insured program banks, so it doubles as a cash account. The competitive rate requires their paid Gold subscription, which I pay for myself — worth it at my balance, but do the arithmetic on yours. And note Robinhood doesn’t pay that interest itself; the program banks do. (my referral link)

And three I recommend on merit, where I get nothing at all: Vanguard for low-cost index funds, Schwab for a full-service brokerage, and American Century — I was a happy customer there for decades.

Rates and terms move, and each of these has its own conditions. Go look at today’s numbers before you move a dollar.

A free conversation about your situation

Damon Day is an independent debt coach, and my co-host on Get Out of Debt Guy — you can also hear us on Spotify. I want you to know that before you decide anything. I receive no payment for this referral.

What did one plate say to the other plate?

Dinner is on me.

Now Let’s Make Your Money Smile

About $160 billion in tariff money is being refunded right now. You paid a chunk of it, and you can’t have any of it back.

Here’s the part nobody put in a headline you’d notice.

In February the Supreme Court ruled 6–3, in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, that the emergency-powers law the tariffs were built on never authorized tariffs in the first place. The law lets a president regulate imports in an emergency. The Court said regulating isn’t taxing, and Congress never wrote taxing into that particular statute. So the tariffs weren’t just repealed going forward — they were unlawful from the day they were imposed.

Which means the money has to go back. Somewhere around $160 billion of it.

Now follow where it goes, because this is the whole thing. A tariff is paid at the border by the importer of record — the American company bringing the goods in. Not the foreign factory, not you. That company then decides how much of the cost to move into its shelf prices, and mostly it moved all of it. Customs built a refund system this spring called CAPE to pay the money back, and CAPE pays exactly one party: the importer of record.

So the refunds are real and they are landing. CNN, reporting the companies’ own disclosures, lists Walmart at about $2.9 billion, Apple around $2.2 billion, Ford at $1.3 billion, Target at $994 million, Home Depot at $730 million, Nike at $684 million and Amazon at $640 million.

And you, who actually paid it at the register, have no claim form. There isn’t one. I want to be very clear about that, because I’d rather tell you nothing is coming than let you spend a Saturday looking for a portal that doesn’t exist. Estimates cited across the coverage put the average household’s tariff cost for 2025–26 at roughly $1,700, and put the share of refund money expected to reach consumers in any form at about 15 to 20 percent.

There is a lawsuit trying to force the issue. Cavallaro v. Target, filed in July in the Southern District of New York, alleges Target raised prices on tariffed and untariffed goods, is collecting a government refund as the importer, and has returned none of it to the people who funded the increase. It’s one of more than eighty suits like it. Every word of that is an allegation. No court has found Target liable, and I wouldn’t plan around it.

If you know somebody who spent the last two years angry about prices and assuming that was just how it is now — send them this one. They paid into this. The refund is real, it’s being paid out this month, and nobody is going to write to them about it.

The useful half: some of it is coming back, just not evenly

This is the part you can actually act on, because it’s a shopping decision rather than a claim.

A few retailers are pushing the refund straight back into prices. CNBC reports that Walmart put its $2.9 billion into cuts on about 11,000 items, ground beef among them. Burlington got $55 million and says every dollar of it goes into lower prices — roughly 40% this quarter, 60% next. Their CEO, Michael O’Sullivan, said it plainly: rather than take “a one-time boost to earnings,” they intend to “fully invest these refunds back,” pointing at moderate- and lower-income families who’ve struggled with the cost of living. The cosmetics company e.l.f. took about $50 million and cut prices permanently on roughly a tenth of its catalog.

Lowe’s got $80 million and did not put it into prices. It went to margins.

I’m not telling you to boycott anybody. I’m telling you that “everything costs more now” has stopped being uniformly true in the last three weeks, and the companies that are handing it back are saying so out loud on earnings calls. It’s worth knowing which is which before a big purchase.

While we’re on invisible costs: the FTC says Amazon ran one on its own sellers

Yesterday the FTC and twenty-two state attorneys general sued Amazon in federal court in Washington State.

The allegation is specific and, if you’ve ever run an auction of any kind, kind of breathtaking. According to the complaint, advertisers were told the ad auctions were “second price” — you win, you pay a penny more than the next-highest bidder. The FTC alleges that for seven years the actual charge exceeded the winning bid in nearly 80% of cases, and that the surcharge was leaned on hardest around Prime Day and Black Friday. It quotes internal 2024 notes from Amazon’s own ads chief and chief digital economist describing it as a “clever non-transparent way to charge first price” that was “incredibly effective,” and other documents warning that disclosing it would do “irrevocable damage to advertiser trust.”

Allegations, all of it. Nothing is proven, and the company gets to answer in court.

Why it’s in a household newsletter: the complaint says this hit more than a million advertisers, over 500,000 of them small and medium businesses. Iowa’s attorney general made the connection out loud — if a small business’s costs go up, it passes them to the customer, so Iowans shopping there were overpaying too. That’s the mechanism. It’s one hop, but it’s a real hop.

If you’re behind on filing taxes, something changed this year and nobody announced it

The Treasury’s tax watchdog published its annual compliance report yesterday, and one number in it is worth your attention.

In fiscal 2023 the IRS sent zero automated notices to individual non-filers. In fiscal 2025 it sent about 3.2 million. That’s not a policy announcement; it’s a machine that was switched back on.

Meanwhile the enforcement that gets talked about went the other way. The IRS lost roughly 27% of its examination and collection staff in a single year, exams opened on individual returns fell 30%, and exams on people earning over $400,000 fell 27%. Total enforcement revenue slipped from $98.7 billion to $93.8 billion. But collection revenue rose 17%, and the report attributes that mainly to the notices restarting. The report is here if you want it.

So: fewer audits of large incomes, far more automated letters to ordinary people who stopped filing. If that’s you, the useful thing is that an unfiled return is a much smaller problem than an ignored notice, and it is nearly always cheaper to walk in the door than to be found. Filing late is not a crime you get arrested for. It’s a bill with penalties that stop growing once you engage.

Two minutes, and one of these is a genuine danger

Four recalls worth checking against your own house.

• Goal Zero YETI 3000X portable power stations — the circuit board can overheat and start a fire. The fix is a free firmware update through the app. If you bought one for storm season, do this before storm season.

• Koorlian mattresses — they fail the federal flammability standard. The remedy is a free cover that brings them into compliance.

• JINHEZO mini LED tea lights — the button batteries are reachable. A swallowed button battery burns through a child’s esophagus in hours. Full refund with proof you’ve disposed of them. If you have small children and these are in the house, this is the one to do first.

• Cuisinart grill brushes — Conair expanded the recall; over 3.6 million are now covered. Bristles come loose and end up in food.

“Clean background check required” is a rejection letter in disguise

Maryland’s attorney general settled a case yesterday with a property manager over exactly that phrase in rental ads. His civil rights division found reasonable cause to believe the wording had a discriminatory effect, and his line about it is the best sentence I read all week: it “tells people not to bother before they’ve even applied.”

The company pays $30,000, strips the language, has to do individualized assessment instead of a blanket screen, and has to offer notice and an application-fee waiver to certain people it turned down. Maryland’s Fair Chance Housing Act then takes effect October 1.

That’s one state and one company. I’m including it because the pattern is national: a lot of people read that phrase in a listing and never apply, and the number of applications a screening rule quietly prevents never shows up in anyone’s statistics.

What I published on the site

• My Paycheck Is Being Garnished for a Defaulted Student Loan. Here’s What to Do

• Your Creditors Aren’t Judging You. They’re Running a Model — So Should You.

• Damon Day Made $565 Driving New Year’s Eve. In 2023, It Was $1,000.

One more thing

If you want the longer version of any of this, the Weekday Briefing is where I take one thing at a time instead of six things quickly. The podcast is there too, if you’d rather listen than read. And if somebody forwarded you this and you’d like your own copy, the subscribe button is right here.

I’m not an attorney, and none of this is legal advice for your situation. Every figure and quote above links to where it came from, and I’d rather you clicked through than took my word for it. The Target and Amazon matters are allegations in filed complaints — no court has found anybody liable, and both companies get their say.

Something struck me putting today together. The single biggest money story on this page is $160 billion moving from a government back to companies, over a cost that you paid, through a process built so that you specifically cannot touch it. That’s not a scandal. Nobody hid it. It’s just how the plumbing was laid, and the plumbing was laid by people who were not thinking about you.

That’s most of what I do here — read the plumbing and tell you where it runs. It’s not glamorous and it doesn’t make anybody rich. But knowing that a refund exists and isn’t coming to you is worth something real: it’s an afternoon you don’t waste, and it’s one less thing you blame yourself for. You didn’t miss a form. There was never a form.

Back tomorrow.

— Steve

Bonus Section

A few places I actually use, and what I get out of telling you. Each one shows a plain link and my referral link. If you use mine, the company may hand us both a small bonus. The plain link goes to exactly the same place — it just pays me nothing, and you nothing. Use whichever you like; genuinely, it’s your call.

I’ve also listed places I like that pay me nothing at all, so you can see the difference.

Cash that actually earns something

Betterment — their Cash Reserve account is the closest thing here to a plain high-yield savings account. (my referral link)

Robinhood’s cash sweep pays competitively too. The good rate sits behind their paid Gold tier — I pay for it myself — so on a small balance the subscription can eat the gain. It’s under Investing below. Do the arithmetic before you subscribe.

And one where nobody pays anybody: TreasuryDirect is the government’s own site. You buy Treasury bills straight from the Treasury with no broker in the middle — $100 minimum, in $100 increments, terms from four weeks out to a year. There is no app, no bonus and no referral link in existence for it. I mention it because for money you know you won’t touch for a few months, it’s usually the honest number the others have to beat.

Saving without having to think about it

Acorns — rounds up your spare change and invests it automatically. I pay for it, and the reason is simple: it saves money I’d otherwise spend without noticing. (my referral link)

And the version that costs nobody anything, me included: a standing transfer out of checking on payday, at the bank you already have. Acorns works because it moves the money before you notice it; a transfer you set once and forget does the same thing. If you’d rather not open another account, do that instead — I’d genuinely rather you saved something than used my link.

Investing

Robinhood — the platform I run my own experiment on. Uninvested cash is swept to FDIC-insured program banks, so it doubles as a cash account. The competitive rate requires their paid Gold subscription, which I pay for myself — worth it at my balance, but do the arithmetic on yours. And note Robinhood doesn’t pay that interest itself; the program banks do. (my referral link)

And three I recommend on merit, where I get nothing at all: Vanguard for low-cost index funds, Schwab for a full-service brokerage, and American Century — I was a happy customer there for decades.

Rates and terms move, and each of these has its own conditions. Go look at today’s numbers before you move a dollar.

A free conversation about your situation

Damon Day is an independent debt coach, and my co-host on Get Out of Debt Guy — you can also hear us on Spotify. I want you to know that before you decide anything. I receive no payment for this referral.

The consultation is free. The only time money changes hands is if you decide you want to hire him as a consultant. Go to DamonDay.com and schedule — he doesn’t cold-call anybody, and neither do I.

Or ask me, anonymously

Ask Steve — free, private, and I’m not selling anything. No account, no email, no sales pitch at the end of it.

Apparently, there’s a medicine you can purchase that cures skepticism.

But I’m not buying it.

Now Let’s Make Your Money Smile

Walmart recalled this dresser. Then it got sold to people anyway.

Here’s a sentence I had to read three times before I believed it.

Last Thursday the Consumer Product Safety Commission reannounced a recall on the Mainstays nine-drawer fabric dresser — the cheap fabric-and-metal-frame kind, about $80, sold at Walmart and on Walmart.com from September 2023 through March 2026. Roughly 165,000 of them were recalled back in May for tip-over and entrapment hazards to children.

The reason it’s back in the news is the part that got me. After the May recall, dressers went out to consumers anyway, through four liquidators. The CPSC names them: OMG California Community of Riverside, California; Threads of Fenton, Michigan; Golden Cone Electronic of Elkhart, Indiana; and ReturnPro of Miami, Florida. If you bought a cheap dresser from a liquidation outlet, a discount site or a returns reseller in the last few months, nobody along that chain necessarily told you it had already been pulled.

That’s why I’m telling you. Not because a dresser is expensive — because a recall is supposed to be the system working, and this is a case where the notice and the product went in different directions.

Today, two minutes. Look under the top panel of any fabric dresser in your house. The tracking and lot number and the manufacture date, printed MM/YYYY, are on a label there. “Mainstays 9-Drawer Fabric Dresser” is what it says on the receipt and the box. If it’s yours: stop using it now unless it’s anchored to a wall, move it where a child can’t get to it, and call Walmart on 800-925-6278 or go to corporate.walmart.com/recalls. The CPSC says the remedy is a full refund — you return the drawers to any Walmart store and dispose of the frame per the recall notice.

Straight about the limits: the CPSC lists no injuries reported on this one. This is the recall doing its job before something happens, which is the only version of this story anybody wants.

⚠ Forward this to whoever in your life furnished a kid’s room on a budget this year. The dressers were $80 and they went out through liquidators after they were recalled, so a recall notice was never going to find that buyer. It costs them two minutes to look under the top panel, and the refund is full. If nobody tells them, nothing tells them.

“They’re registered with the SEC” turns out not to mean what you think.

On Wednesday the SEC charged 38 entities with making material misrepresentations on Forms ADV — the filing an investment adviser makes with the Commission — to pass themselves off as legitimate advisory firms to American investors.

Read what the SEC says was in those filings. Business addresses in Colorado where the firms had no presence. Phone numbers that were disconnected or belonged to unrelated businesses. Ownership structures and numbers identical or nearly identical across a whole cluster of them. Financial statements they said had been audited by one of two accounting firms — neither of which appears in any public registry of federal or state accountancy firms. Several connected to the SEC’s filing system from IP addresses tracked to foreign countries. And some of the websites marketing them displayed a certificate saying the firm was SEC-registered when it was not.

“Our complaints allege large-scale abuse of SEC adviser filings by persons, several of whom are likely located overseas, exploiting interest in emerging technologies,” said Laura D’Allaird, who runs the SEC Enforcement Division’s Cyber and Emerging Technologies Unit.

These are allegations, filed in federal court in Colorado under the Investment Advisers Act; no court has found liability.

Here’s why this belongs in a debt newsletter. A filing is not a vetting. Somebody submits a form, the form goes in the system, and now there’s an official-looking record with the government’s name near it. That is the same trick that makes a debt relief company sound licensed because it has a state registration number, or makes a credit repair outfit sound approved because it belongs to an association it pays to belong to. Registered, filed, member, accredited — those words describe paperwork, not a background check somebody did on your behalf.

Today, sixty seconds. Look the firm up yourself at adviserinfo.sec.gov. It’s the SEC’s own free database, no account needed. If a firm’s own website shows you a registration certificate but the database doesn’t show the firm, believe the database.

If you’ve ever been a credit counseling client, there’s $45 sitting there — and the deadline is in sixteen days.

American Consumer Credit Counseling had a data breach in January 2025. Top Class Actions reports a settlement in Dinkel, et al. v. American Consumer Credit Counseling Inc. in Middlesex County Superior Court in Massachusetts, open to people whose information was involved — including anyone who got a breach notice.

The terms: up to $3,500 for documented out-of-pocket losses, or a flat $45 payment if you’d rather not dig up receipts. Claims are due September 16, 2026. Final approval hearing is October 8. The settlement site is ACCCSettlement.com.

I’m flagging this one specifically because of who it lands on. People go to credit counseling when money is already tight. If that was you, and a letter about a breach arrived in 2025 when you had bigger things to worry about, the $45 is still there and it takes a few minutes. Don’t file if you weren’t affected — you’re signing under penalty of perjury.

And while you’re in a claiming mood: the Kroger pharmacy money closes in December.

We wrote up the $17 million Kroger pharmacy settlement on Thursday — who qualifies and how to file, with the December 2026 deadline. Same principle as the one above: nobody emails you when your claim window opens, and nobody emails you when it closes.

If the IRS is taking money out of your paycheck, this one is different from every other garnishment.

We published a crisis guide on IRS wage levies on Thursday, and there’s one fact in it I want people to have even if they never read the rest.

Most garnishments take a slice of one paycheck and have to come back for the next one. An IRS levy under 26 U.S.C. § 6331 is continuous. It attaches to your wages and stays attached to every paycheck until the IRS releases it. Your employer is legally required to keep withholding. It does not expire on its own, and waiting is not a strategy with this one.

A fixed amount of your pay is protected based on your filing status and dependents, under IRS Publication 1494 — and the amount they’re leaving you is frequently wrong, because it’s calculated off a form most people never returned. That’s fixable. So is checking whether your Collection Due Process window is still open, which turns on the date on the actual notice they sent you.

The scale nobody quotes at you.

Since Friday, our sweep of federal court filings found at least 59 new cases against the three big credit bureaus — 33 against Equifax, 14 against Experian, 12 against TransUnion. In three days.

I say “at least” and I mean it. That sweep reads federal dockets only, we don’t monitor state courts, and federal indexing runs a week or two behind, so the real number is higher and I don’t know by how much. It’s a floor, not a total.

What it’s evidence of: ordinary people take these companies to court constantly, and the reason you don’t hear about it is that individual cases are boring to everybody except the person who won one.

What I published on the site

• I Owe Everyone at Once, and Retirement Isn’t Far Off. Here’s Where to Actually Start.

• The IRS Is Taking Money From My Paycheck. Here’s What to Do Right Now.

• The $17 Million Kroger Pharmacy Settlement Is Open — How to File Your Claim Before December 2026

One more thing

If you want the longer version of any of this, the Weekday Briefing is where I go deeper on one thing at a time instead of five things quickly. And if somebody forwarded you this and you’d like it yourself, the subscribe button is right here.

I’m not an attorney, and none of this is legal advice for your situation. Every number and quote above links to where it came from, and I’d rather you clicked through than took my word for it. Allegations in a court filing are allegations — no court has found anybody liable in the cases I mentioned.

I noticed something writing today’s issue. Four of these items are money or protection that already belongs to you — a refund, a claim, a lookup, a limit on what they can take. None of it required you to earn more, negotiate harder, or be smarter than anyone. It was just sitting there, unclaimed, because nobody’s job is to tell you it exists.

That’s most of what I do here. Not because the news is good — because a surprising amount of what’s already yours is going unclaimed, and finding one piece of it this week is an ordinary thing that ordinary people do all the time.

Back tomorrow.

— Steve

Bonus Section

A few places I actually use, and what I get out of telling you. Each one shows a plain link and my referral link. If you use mine, the company may hand us both a small bonus. The plain link goes to exactly the same place — it just pays me nothing, and you nothing. Use whichever you like; genuinely, it’s your call.

I’ve also listed places I like that pay me nothing at all, so you can see the difference.

Cash that actually earns something

Betterment — their Cash Reserve account is the closest thing here to a plain high-yield savings account. (my referral link)

Robinhood’s cash sweep pays competitively too. The good rate sits behind their paid Gold tier — I pay for it myself — so on a small balance the subscription can eat the gain. It’s under Investing below. Do the arithmetic before you subscribe.

And one where nobody pays anybody: TreasuryDirect is the government’s own site. You buy Treasury bills straight from the Treasury with no broker in the middle — $100 minimum, in $100 increments, terms from four weeks out to a year. There is no app, no bonus and no referral link in existence for it. I mention it because for money you know you won’t touch for a few months, it’s usually the honest number the others have to beat.

Saving without having to think about it

Acorns — rounds up your spare change and invests it automatically. I pay for it, and the reason is simple: it saves money I’d otherwise spend without noticing. (my referral link)

And the version that costs nobody anything, me included: a standing transfer out of checking on payday, at the bank you already have. Acorns works because it moves the money before you notice it; a transfer you set once and forget does the same thing. If you’d rather not open another account, do that instead — I’d genuinely rather you saved something than used my link.

Investing

Robinhood — the platform I run my own experiment on. Uninvested cash is swept to FDIC-insured program banks, so it doubles as a cash account. The competitive rate requires their paid Gold subscription, which I pay for myself — worth it at my balance, but do the arithmetic on yours. And note Robinhood doesn’t pay that interest itself; the program banks do. (my referral link)

And three I recommend on merit, where I get nothing at all: Vanguard for low-cost index funds, Schwab for a full-service brokerage, and American Century — I was a happy customer there for decades.

Rates and terms move, and each of these has its own conditions. Go look at today’s numbers before you move a dollar.

A free conversation about your situation

Damon Day is an independent debt coach, and my co-host on Get Out of Debt Guy — you can also hear us on Spotify. I want you to know that before you decide anything. I receive no payment for this referral.

The consultation is free. The only time money changes hands is if you decide you want to hire him as a consultant. Go to DamonDay.com and schedule — he doesn’t cold-call anybody, and neither do I.

Or ask me, anonymously

Ask Steve — free, private, and I’m not selling anything. No account, no email, no sales pitch at the end of it.

What’s a vampire’s favorite fruit?

A blood orange.

Now Let’s Make Your Money Smile

Your phone was probably not listening. Somebody just got fined for saying it was.

You know the feeling. You mention a mattress out loud, and by lunchtime your phone is full of mattress ads. Everybody I know has a version of that story.

Yesterday the FTC finalized orders requiring three companies to pay $930,000 over a product marketed as exactly that. CMG Media Corporation — it does business as Cox Media Group — pays $880,000, and two marketing firms it worked with, MindSift and 1010 Digital Works, pay $25,000 each. The FTC says they told advertisers they had an algorithm that listened in on conversations picked up by smart devices, and that consumers had agreed to it.

Then comes the sentence worth reading twice, in the FTC’s own words: “Contrary to these companies’ claims, however, the marketing service wasn’t based on voice data, and consumers hadn’t opted into this service.”

Straight about the limits: three firms, one product. This is not a finding that no app anywhere ever listens, and the $930,000 reimburses the advertisers who bought the service, not you.

Here’s why it’s about your money and not just your nerves. If you believe the microphone did it, you whisper. You cover a camera. You feel watched, and nothing changes. The FTC’s file says what the service wasn’t running on; it doesn’t say what it was. The boring answer nobody makes a documentary about is information about you being collected, bought and sold, entirely legally, while you sit there eyeing your phone.

Today, ten minutes. Here are the actual taps, because “check your privacy settings” is useless advice without them. All of this is free and none of it breaks anything.

On an iPhone, two separate switches, and most people have never touched either:

• Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking — turn off Allow Apps to Request to Track. That cuts off apps following you into other companies’ apps and websites.

• Settings → Privacy & Security → Apple Advertising — turn off Personalized Ads. That’s Apple’s own targeting, and it’s a different switch. (Apple’s instructions)

On an Android, one place: Settings → Privacy → Ads → Delete advertising ID. On older versions it’s Settings → Privacy → Advanced → Ads. Deleting the ID is stronger than resetting it. (Google’s instructions)

Android menus move around between manufacturers, so if Privacy isn’t there, search the Settings app for “Ads” — that finds it on every phone I’ve tried it on. And straight with you: this doesn’t stop the ads, and it doesn’t reach the data already sold. It stops your phone handing over a fresh permanent ID to everyone who asks. That’s the mechanism that’s actually there.

⚠ Forward this one to the person who tapes over their laptop camera.
They have been fighting the wrong thing for years, and they’d want to know. Ten minutes in their phone settings does more than the tape ever did, and nobody is going to tell them that but you.

A credit bureau just said the quiet part out loud.

The entire sales pitch for debt settlement rests on one idea: it’s the softer option, the one that spares your credit compared to the nuclear option of bankruptcy.

Yesterday TransUnion published an analysis that points the other way. Among people who enrolled in third-party debt settlement while they were still current on their bills, the median credit score fell 96 points — 645 six months before enrolling, down to 549 six months after. Bankruptcy filers, over the identical six-month window, fell 20 points.

That is one of the three big credit bureaus, using its own data, saying settlement did more damage to those people’s scores than bankruptcy did.

And this is the number I keep going back to: nearly half of everyone who enrolled in debt settlement was current on their bills when they signed up. Not behind. Not in collections. Paying.

Now let me hand you the strongest argument against my own reading, because it is a real one and you deserve it before you decide what to think — the two groups are not like for like: the 96-point group started from a healthy 645, while the people who ended up filing bankruptcy had a median around 570 three months out, and a score already that low has far less left to fall. Twenty points isn’t a measure of how gentle bankruptcy is; it’s a measure of damage that had already happened before anyone started the clock.

Here’s what survives that objection. Three months before either event, the two groups looked alike — the settlement group’s median VantageScore 4.0 was 587, against 570 for the people who went on to file. If anything the settlement group was slightly healthier. Six months later it was the settlement group that had fallen further and faster.

Two honest limits, and I’d rather you heard them from me. TransUnion (NYSE: TRU) sells risk-scoring products to lenders, so on credit scores it is both a legitimate source and an interested one — hold those two facts at the same time. And per its own release it published no sample size, nothing on fees, nothing on lawsuits, and nothing on how many people actually finish these programs.

I ran a credit counseling organization. I filed bankruptcy myself, in 1990. I have spent thirty-odd years listening to companies describe, with a straight face, what their program will do to somebody’s credit. This is the first time a bureau has put its own numbers next to the claim.

If somebody is pitching you settlement today: ask them, in writing, what happens to your credit score in the first six months — and then read the numbers before you make another payment.

So what does work? We went and looked, and the answer is uncomfortable for the whole industry.

Knowing settlement is worse than advertised only gets you halfway. The question people actually ask me is “then what?” — so I put the research together across more than twenty peer-reviewed studies, and the finding is consistent: for people who are genuinely insolvent, bankruptcy gets them further ahead, faster, for less.

Further ahead. The strongest study here is Dobbie and Song in the American Economic Review. Because bankruptcy judges are assigned at random, it works like a real experiment rather than a survey — you can compare people granted Chapter 13 protection against people denied it, who were otherwise alike. Those granted protection earned $5,562 more a year, and their five-year mortality was 30% lower. Not 30% lower than the general population — 30% lower than people in the same situation who were turned down.

Faster. A Chapter 7 discharge takes four to six months, and about 95% of cases get one. A debt management plan or a settlement program takes three to five years, and fewer people finish. Even Chapter 13, the slow version of bankruptcy, completes at roughly double the rate of a DMP.

For less. This is the cost nobody puts on the sales sheet: those three to five years are years your retirement account is empty. Redirect $500 a month away from a 401(k) for five years and, compounding at a historical 7% to age 65, you can be out $400,000+ in retirement wealth — that’s a projection on stated assumptions, not a promise, and the assumptions are the point. In bankruptcy, retirement accounts are 100% protected. You don’t spend them, because you’re not asked to.

And the credit myth dies here too: low-score filers gained a median 69 points in the first month after filing.

Two things I won’t oversell. This is for people who are genuinely insolvent — bankruptcy is a legal tool with real consequences, not a life hack, and if you can pay your debts on your current income you are a different case entirely. And I have skin in this: I filed in 1990, and I ran a credit counseling organization that sold the other option. That’s exactly why I went looking at the research instead of trusting my own memory of it.

⚠ Forward this to anyone you know who is enrolled in a debt settlement program right now — or about to be.
Nearly half of the people in these programs were current on their bills when they signed up, which means somebody talked them into it while they were still paying. If that’s your brother, your neighbour, your coworker, they are making payments this month on a promise a credit bureau just contradicted.

A telemarketer can buy every do not call number in America for $23,425

The FTC set next year’s prices this week. From October 1 it’s $85 per area code, and $23,425 buys the whole country. The first five area codes are free, and some charities and political callers get the entire list for nothing.

Read that again, because it rearranges what the registry is. It was never a wall. It’s a list callers pay to read.

So why register? Because of what it does after the call. Under 47 U.S.C. § 227(c)(5), somebody who gets more than one call in a 12-month period from the same outfit, in violation of the do-not-call rules, can sue in state court for their actual loss or up to $500 per call, whichever is greater — and if a court finds the violation was willful or knowing, it may triple that.

I have never sued a debt collector myself. Plenty of my clients over the years did, and won.

The honest other half, because I’d rather you heard it from me: it’s up to $500, not a guaranteed $500. It takes more than one call from the same company. The caller has a defense if it can show it had real procedures in place and this one slipped through. And those exempt charities and political callers aren’t violating anything when they ring.

Today, two minutes: register your number free at donotcall.gov. Then keep a note on your phone — date, time, number, what they were selling. That note is the whole difference between an annoying afternoon and a file.

A computer crashed in 2020. Somebody is still carrying the bill.

This one arrived looking like a government contract dispute, which is exactly why it’s worth reading twice. On Wednesday Maryland’s attorney general sued UnitedHealth Group and Optum over the software that ran Maryland Medicaid’s behavioral health program from 2019 to 2024. Allegations only — no court has found liability, and both companies will get their say.

The headline number is the state’s: a $126.9 million contract, with the suit asking for up to triple that, roughly $380 million. That isn’t the part that stopped me.

This is. The state says the system crashed on its first day and had to be taken offline for eight months in 2020 — a program covering mental health and substance abuse care for 1.5 million people. And among the specific allegations: the software denied legitimate claims, paid providers the wrong amounts, and left hospitals without receipts.

Now think about where that lands. A behavioral health claim wrongly denied doesn’t evaporate. It becomes a bill. The bill becomes a collections account. And the person holding it has no earthly way of knowing the reason was a contractor’s software rather than their own coverage — so they assume it’s theirs, and they either pay it or carry it.

I have watched people make payments for years on medical debt that was never validly theirs. The bill arrives with no explanation attached, and an unexplained bill is very hard to argue with.

If this is you: a Maryland mental health or substance abuse bill from 2019 to 2024, sitting in collections. This filing is not proof your bill is wrong. It is a good reason to make them prove it’s right — send a debt validation letter before you pay another dollar. Ours is free and takes a few minutes.

Money you might actually be owed: $100, no receipts

If you got a data breach notice from Equinox — the gyms, not Equifax the credit bureau — about the April 29, 2024 breach, there’s a $685,000 settlement open now. It’s $100 with no documentation required, up to $5,000 if you have receipts for real losses, plus three years of credit monitoring. Claims close October 23, 2026; the approval hearing is November 12. Equinox has not admitted doing anything wrong.

Dig out the notice if you think one came. A hundred dollars for a form is a good hourly rate.

What I published yesterday

• They Said a Debt Collector Can Sue Me Wherever They Want. Federal Law Says Otherwise.

• A Sheriff Served Me a Writ of Execution. Here’s What to Do Right Now.

One more thing

The longer version — deep dives, full case write-ups — is the Weekday Briefing. This one stays short on purpose.

And if the phone-listening thing surprised you, it’ll surprise whoever you tell it to.

Nothing here is legal or financial advice. I don’t sell debt relief, I take no referral fees from debt companies, and I don’t know your situation. What I have is thirty-some years of watching how this plays out.

Everything I asked of you today is free: a question put in writing before you sign, a settings menu, a registry, a letter that makes a collector prove the debt is yours. That’s the pattern I keep seeing after all these years — the moves that genuinely change somebody’s position are almost never the dramatic ones. They’re small, free, slightly boring, and they were sitting there available the whole time. Most people just never got told.

Now you have been. Have a good weekend.

Back Monday.

— Steve

Bonus Section

A few places I actually use, and what I get out of telling you. Each one shows a plain link and my referral link. If you use mine, the company may hand us both a small bonus. The plain link goes to exactly the same place — it just pays me nothing, and you nothing. Use whichever you like; genuinely, it’s your call.

I’ve also listed places I like that pay me nothing at all, so you can see the difference.

Cash that actually earns something

Betterment — their Cash Reserve account is the closest thing here to a plain high-yield savings account. (my referral link)

Robinhood’s cash sweep pays competitively too. The good rate sits behind their paid Gold tier — I pay for it myself — so on a small balance the subscription can eat the gain. It’s under Investing below. Do the arithmetic before you subscribe.

And one where nobody pays anybody: TreasuryDirect is the government’s own site. You buy Treasury bills straight from the Treasury with no broker in the middle — $100 minimum, in $100 increments, terms from four weeks out to a year. There is no app, no bonus and no referral link in existence for it. I mention it because for money you know you won’t touch for a few months, it’s usually the honest number the others have to beat.

Saving without having to think about it

Acorns — rounds up your spare change and invests it automatically. I pay for it, and the reason is simple: it saves money I’d otherwise spend without noticing. (my referral link)

And the version that costs nobody anything, me included: a standing transfer out of checking on payday, at the bank you already have. Acorns works because it moves the money before you notice it; a transfer you set once and forget does the same thing. If you’d rather not open another account, do that instead — I’d genuinely rather you saved something than used my link.

Investing

Robinhood — the platform I run my own experiment on. Uninvested cash is swept to FDIC-insured program banks, so it doubles as a cash account. The competitive rate requires their paid Gold subscription, which I pay for myself — worth it at my balance, but do the arithmetic on yours. And note Robinhood doesn’t pay that interest itself; the program banks do. (my referral link)

And three I recommend on merit, where I get nothing at all: Vanguard for low-cost index funds, Schwab for a full-service brokerage, and American Century — I was a happy customer there for decades.

Rates and terms move, and each of these has its own conditions. Go look at today’s numbers before you move a dollar.

A free conversation about your situation

Damon Day is an independent debt coach, and my co-host on Get Out of Debt Guy — you can also hear us on Spotify. I want you to know that before you decide anything. I receive no payment for this referral.

The consultation is free. The only time money changes hands is if you decide you want to hire him as a consultant. Go to DamonDay.com and schedule — he doesn’t cold-call anybody, and neither do I.

Or ask me, anonymously

Ask Steve — free, private, and I’m not selling anything. No account, no email, no sales pitch at the end of it.

I’m so bored that I just memorized six pages of the dictionary.

I learned next to nothing.

Now Let’s Make Your Money Smile

Uncheck the box. It takes ten seconds.

That little “shipping protection” charge at online checkout? A class action filed in New York federal court alleges Route App slips it into your cart through a widget the store installs — pre-selected, without you agreeing — and that it doesn’t deliver the protection its name promises. Route App hasn’t answered the allegations; no court has found wrongdoing.

The number that stopped me: the complaint says 98% of merchants leave that box pre-checked.

Two or three dollars, by default, on every order, is money that never shows up in a budget. Nobody decides to buy it. They just don’t uncheck it. Today: read the line items before you hit Place Order, and uncheck anything protecting a package you never asked to protect.

⚠ Forward this one before somebody you know places their next order.

Whoever in your life clicks straight through checkout has been paying that box for years and has never once looked at it. Ten seconds of their attention ends it permanently. Not looking costs them two or three dollars on every order they ever place.

$90.1 billion. And 0.38%.

Two FDIC numbers, days apart, both the government’s own.

Banks earned $90.1 billion last quarter — 4,238 of them, up 12%. The national average savings account pays 0.38%; checking pays 0.07%. A Treasury I bond pays 4.26% for bonds issued through October 31.

Fine print, straight: 0.38% is an average, so yours may beat it. I bonds cap at $10,000 a year, lock for twelve months, and cost three months’ interest if you cash out before five years.

And you don’t have to lock anything up to do better than 0.38%. I checked Betterment’s own page this morning: their Cash Reserve account is paying 3.25% APY, variable — no lock-up, withdraw whenever you want. On $10,000 that is $325 a year instead of $38. They also run a new-customer offer of 4.00% right now, which is the 3.25% plus a 0.75% boost on up to $1M through January 15, 2027 — so treat 3.25% as the real number and the boost as a bonus that expires. Betterment and the other cash options I actually use are in the Bonus Section at the bottom, with a plain link beside my referral link every time.

Today: log in and read the actual rate on your savings account. That’s the whole assignment. If you opened it in your twenties and have never looked, you already know how this ends. It’s the one item here that pays you instead of just protecting you.

Amazon owes $309.5 million on returns — and there’s nothing to sign

A judge gave preliminary approval on August 18 to a settlement covering anyone who returned something to Amazon since September 5, 2017 and never got the refund, got the wrong amount, got it late, or got charged again for the item. According to the settlement filing, Amazon denies any wrongdoing and the court was explicit that preliminary approval establishes none.

There is no claim form yet. So if an email or text this week offers to file your Amazon claim for you, that is not Amazon and not the court. Today: nothing — except don’t pay anyone to file it. Watch for a real notice.

Before you sign with a debt relief company, open one free website

From Connecticut’s banking bulletin: on August 14 the Commissioner entered a consent order with Clarity Debt Resolution, Inc. of Irvine, California, alleging it operated in violation of Connecticut’s debt negotiation licensing law since at least June 2023. Clarity paid a $7,600 penalty and $2,400 in back fees.

We already have a page called “Is Clarity Debt Resolution Legit?” — people search that exact question constantly. A regulator just answered it on the record.

Today: if anyone wants you to sign a debt relief agreement, search your state’s banking regulator for their name first. Free, five minutes, and the file almost nobody opens.

That business credit card is probably yours, personally

People keep asking me about a defaulted business credit card and a collector calling, assuming the business shields them. Usually it doesn’t. Almost every small business card is personally guaranteed — you signed individually when you opened it. The business dies; the card doesn’t. And if that balance is later forgiven or settled, the cancelled debt can hit your personal tax return as income unless you were insolvent or it went through bankruptcy.

If that’s you, ask me directly. Free, private, nothing for sale.

One quick one, because the headline is wrong

Ignore the “highest gas price ever” stories — the record is $5.0165, set June 14, 2022. The real number, from the EIA’s own table: $4.085 a gallon last week against $3.147 a year ago. That is 93.8 cents more per gallon, arrived a few cents at a time, with no announcement. Fill up twice a week and roughly $60 a month left your budget in the last year without anyone telling you.

The complaint database just got quieter — and almost nobody will hear about it

On August 14 the CFPB stopped publishing consumers’ written complaint narratives — the actual text of what people wrote about a lender, bank or collector. The counts stay public; the stories move to the FOIA reading room.

I send people to that database constantly, and the narratives are the useful half. Twenty complaints in people’s own words tell you whether a company has one bad department or a bad business model — a number can’t tell you that. If you were ever going to research a company that way, the window on the easy version is closing.

The door most people don’t know they have

At least 25 new federal cases hit the three big credit bureaus in two days — 15 Equifax, 7 Experian, 3 TransUnion. “At least,” because that sees federal courts only and indexing lags a week or two. Ordinary people sue over credit report errors constantly, and most never knew they could. Two from this week: Leandre v. Transworld Systems and Campbell v. Midland Credit Management — allegations only. The honest other half: the same law lets a court award fees against you for a bad-faith filing. A door, not a lottery ticket.

What I published yesterday

• Meta Will Pay at Least $12.1 Billion Over Kids’ Social Media Safety — Don’t Expect a Claim Form

• Connecticut Just Ordered CDS Financial to Cease and Desist — I Flagged This Same Operation Seven Years Ago

• Should I Pay Student Loans With a Credit Card?

One more thing

The longer version — deep dives, full case write-ups — is the Weekday Briefing. This one stays short on purpose.

And if the 93 cents a gallon, or the business card that turned out to be personal, made you think of someone specific — send this to them too.

Nothing here is legal or financial advice. I don’t sell debt relief, I take no referral fees from debt companies, and I don’t know your situation. What I have is thirty-some years of watching how this plays out.

None of today is glamorous. Uncheck a box. Read a rate you’ve ignored for a decade. Open a regulator’s site before you sign. But that is how people climb out, and I’ve watched a lot of them do it — one honest look at a time, on an ordinary Thursday, when nothing in particular was on fire.

Start with whichever one takes ten seconds.

Back tomorrow.

— Steve

Bonus Section

A few places I actually use, and what I get out of telling you. Each one shows a plain link and my referral link. If you use mine, the company may hand us both a small bonus. The plain link goes to exactly the same place — it just pays me nothing, and you nothing. Use whichever you like; genuinely, it’s your call.

I’ve also listed places I like that pay me nothing at all, so you can see the difference.

Cash that actually earns something

Betterment — their Cash Reserve account is the closest thing here to a plain high-yield savings account. (my referral link)

Robinhood’s cash sweep pays competitively too. The good rate sits behind their paid Gold tier — I pay for it myself — so on a small balance the subscription can eat the gain. It’s under Investing below. Do the arithmetic before you subscribe.

And one where nobody pays anybody: TreasuryDirect is the government’s own site. You buy Treasury bills straight from the Treasury with no broker in the middle — $100 minimum, in $100 increments, terms from four weeks out to a year. There is no app, no bonus and no referral link in existence for it. I mention it because for money you know you won’t touch for a few months, it’s usually the honest number the others have to beat.

Saving without having to think about it

Acorns — rounds up your spare change and invests it automatically. I pay for it, and the reason is simple: it saves money I’d otherwise spend without noticing. (my referral link)

And the version that costs nobody anything, me included: a standing transfer out of checking on payday, at the bank you already have. Acorns works because it moves the money before you notice it; a transfer you set once and forget does the same thing. If you’d rather not open another account, do that instead — I’d genuinely rather you saved something than used my link.

Investing

Robinhood — the platform I run my own experiment on. Uninvested cash is swept to FDIC-insured program banks, so it doubles as a cash account. The competitive rate requires their paid Gold subscription, which I pay for myself — worth it at my balance, but do the arithmetic on yours. And note Robinhood doesn’t pay that interest itself; the program banks do. (my referral link)

And three I recommend on merit, where I get nothing at all: Vanguard for low-cost index funds, Schwab for a full-service brokerage, and American Century — I was a happy customer there for decades.

Rates and terms move, and each of these has its own conditions. Go look at today’s numbers before you move a dollar.

A free conversation about your situation

Damon Day is an independent debt coach, and my co-host on Get Out of Debt Guy — you can also hear us on Spotify. I want you to know that before you decide anything. I receive no payment for this referral.

The consultation is free. The only time money changes hands is if you decide you want to hire him as a consultant. Go to DamonDay.com and schedule — he doesn’t cold-call anybody, and neither do I.

Or ask me, anonymously

Ask Steve — free, private, and I’m not selling anything. No account, no email, no sales pitch at the end of it.

I just invented a thought-controlled money printer.

I know it sounds crazy, but it makes cents when you think about it.

Subscribe now

Now Let’s Make Your Money Smile

The “holding account” your money goes into might just be somebody’s checking account

Here’s the thing I’ve spent thirty years trying to get people to believe, and last week a state regulator wrote it down, at length and under signature, so I don’t have to.

On August 18, Connecticut’s Banking Commissioner issued a temporary cease and desist order against a debt relief outfit called CDS Debt Relief LLC, doing business as CDS Financial, along with David Lugo and Kevin Lugo. You can read the whole order yourself — it’s a PDF, it’s free, and nobody needs my permission to look at it. These are allegations. There’s a right to a hearing and no court has found liability.

But look at what the Department says it found in six months of one bank account. Roughly 1,569 payments came in from people around the country, about $488,751 of it. And in those same statements, the regulator says there is not one payoff of a consumer’s debt. Not one. What the statements do show, according to the order: $62,700 moved to David Lugo’s personal accounts, $95,008 in cash withdrawals, $113,100 to American Express, $32,216 to Discover, $3,311 to Capital One, and $8,143 to Toyota Financial for a car.

The Connecticut man whose complaint started it says he paid $1,000 a month for seven months — $7,000 — and got nothing. Then the collection calls started, from the very creditors his debt was supposedly enrolled with. When he called to ask what was happening, the order says the company hung up on him, repeatedly, and never answered an email. Another woman told the Better Business Bureau she’s “out $8,000.”

Now here’s the part I want you to actually take away, because it isn’t the outrage — it’s the paperwork. His contract said his payments were “transferred into a bank holding account on client’s behalf.” That sentence is doing enormous work. Connecticut law requires a licensed debt adjuster to keep a separate account for the benefit of debtors. The regulator says this money went into an ordinary operating account and straight back out again.

And CDS Financial, per the order, has never been licensed to do this work in Connecticut — or in any other state. Not one. That’s checkable, by you, in about ninety seconds, before you send anybody a dollar: the NMLS Consumer Access database is free and public. Type in the company name. If a company wants your bank account on a monthly draft and it isn’t there, you have learned everything you need to know.

The fee tells you something too. The contract charged 25% of the debt you enrolled. Connecticut caps a debt negotiator at 10% of the amount your debt is actually reduced — a completely different number, tied to a result rather than to your hopes. When the fee is calculated on what you owe instead of on what they save you, they get paid whether or not anything happens. Which, in this case, the regulator says is exactly what occurred.

If you’re paying a debt relief company right now and you can’t say where your money is sitting, that’s your afternoon. Ask them, in writing, for the name of the bank holding it. A real one will tell you.

Why the credit bureaus get sued this much, and what it means when it’s your file

While we’re on things people blame themselves for. In the last week, federal courts took in at least 137 new suits naming the three big credit bureaus — 73 against Equifax, 37 against Experian, 27 against Trans Union. Georgia, Michigan, Texas, Illinois, Florida, California.

Two honest caveats, because a number like that is easy to oversell. It’s federal courts only, and the Fair Credit Reporting Act lets people sue in state court too, which we don’t track at all. And the federal index runs a week or two behind itself, so the most recent days are undercounted. So 137 is a floor, twice over. The real number is higher and I can’t tell you by how much.

Here’s why I bring it up anyway. When something’s wrong on your credit report, most people treat fixing it as a favor they’re asking — a chore, a bit of admin, faintly embarrassing. It isn’t. The accuracy of that file is a legal obligation that sits on the bureau, not on you, and several hundred people a month are in federal court about it. You are not being difficult. You’re one of the ones who noticed.

Money you might actually be owed

MOVEit, through Ernst & Young and Bank of America — $2.5 million. If your information was caught in the MOVEit breach between May 27 and May 31, 2023, this one’s open. It’s $100 flat with no paperwork at all, up to $2,500 with documentation of ordinary costs (bank fees, phone calls, and your own time at $25 an hour up to four hours), and up to $10,000 for real identity-theft damage. Two years of credit monitoring on top. Claims close October 8, 2026 — but if you want to opt out and keep your own right to sue, that decision is due September 8, which is thirteen days away. Details.

Healthcare Services Group — $3 million. This one’s for people who got a breach notice tied to the September 27, 2024 incident. Up to $5,000 if you can document losses, and — this is the useful part — a share of what’s left even if you can’t document a thing. Three years of credit monitoring. Claims close October 1, 2026; opt-out is September 4. Details.

Two more worth a look if either touches you: the $475,000 Total Vision data breach settlement, and — if you’re a Detroit water customer — the $4.45 million Detroit water rates settlement.

Claims worth knowing about, all still unproven

These are filings, not findings. Nobody’s been held liable, and I’m linking them so you can read the allegation rather than take my word for the shape of it.

Jackson Hewitt and Intuit are accused of charging fees that break the Military Lending Act — worth flagging because that law caps the all-in rate on most consumer credit to servicemembers at 36%, and a lot of people in uniform don’t know it covers them. Separately, a judge has let a Military Lending Act case against Bank of America go forward, narrowed but alive. TikTok is accused of sending marketing texts that violated the TCPA. Steve Madden is accused of running inflated “reference prices” to make discounts look bigger than they were, and Google is facing the same accusation about its AI subscription pricing. Two very different companies, one very old trick.

The one to warn someone about

This is the one to forward. In the last two days, law enforcement in three separate places — Palm Desert, California, Calhoun County, Michigan, and Huron County, Michigan — all put out the same warning: somebody is phoning residents, claiming to be a deputy or a federal agent, and demanding money.

Three departments, two states, inside forty-eight hours. That’s not three local incidents. That’s an operation working a list.

The Palm Desert version is the one I’d most want my own mother to have heard, because it doesn’t sound like a shakedown at all. The caller says he’s from the FBI, tells you your money is at risk, and helps you move it somewhere “safe.” You aren’t being robbed, in the story he’s telling — you’re being rescued. That’s a much harder thing to hang up on than a demand.

What makes any of these work is that they sound procedural rather than greedy. There’s a case number. There’s a real deputy’s name, because those are public. And there’s a deadline, which is the whole engine — just enough time to panic, not enough to call anyone.

So here’s the rule, and it has no exceptions: no sheriff’s office, no court, and no federal agency will ever call you and ask for money. Not by gift card, not by wire, not by Cash App, not by crypto, and not by “verifying” your debit card. If someone is on the phone asking for any of those, you already know it’s a scam, no matter how much of your information they seem to have. Hang up and call the department back on the number from its own website. The FTC keeps a plain-English page on exactly this (how to avoid a government impersonation scam) and it’s worth three minutes.

Tell somebody over seventy about this one today. It’s the single most useful thing in this email.

Also worth two minutes

Glenmark is facing a class action over its blood-pressure drug Carvedilol, alleged to be contaminated with nitrosamines. If that’s your prescription, don’t stop taking it on the strength of a newsletter — ring your pharmacist and ask, because stopping a blood-pressure medication on your own is its own risk.

And one thought on the two people at the top of this email. Both were paying a company every month specifically to avoid bankruptcy, and between them they’re out $15,000 with every original debt still standing. Whatever you think of bankruptcy, it has a court, a judge, a trustee and a docket you can look up. The alternative they bought had a PDF contract and a phone number that stopped being answered. That asymmetry is worth sitting with before you pay anyone to keep you out of a courtroom.

Before you go

If one person came to mind while you were reading — the sheriff scam, or somebody you know who’s sending money every month to a debt relief company they can’t quite describe — forward this to them. That’s how this list grows, and it’s the only way I ask.

You want the longer version of all this? The Weekday Briefing is the depth to this email’s breadth. And if you’d rather just ask me something without giving your name, Ask Steve is free, private, and I’m not selling anything at the end of it.

Everything above is what I’m seeing and what I’d tell my own family. You know your situation and I don’t. Take it as input, not instruction — nobody gets to tell you what to do with your money, me included.

One last thing. Reading an email like this one can leave you feeling like it’s all happening to you — the scammers, the bureaus, the outfit with your $7,000. It isn’t. In thirty years I’ve watched an enormous number of people get out of this, and almost none of them did it with a windfall or a clever trick. They did it by looking at one honest number and making one decision, and then doing that again the next week. That is genuinely how it goes. You’ve got more room than today made it feel like.

Back tomorrow.

— Steve

Bonus Section

A few places I actually use, and what I get out of telling you. Each one shows a plain link and my referral link. If you use mine, the company may hand us both a small bonus. The plain link goes to exactly the same place — it just pays me nothing, and you nothing. Use whichever you like; genuinely, it’s your call.

I’ve also listed places I like that pay me nothing at all, so you can see the difference.

Cash that actually earns something

Betterment — their Cash Reserve account is the closest thing here to a plain high-yield savings account. (my referral link)

Robinhood’s cash sweep pays competitively too. The good rate sits behind their paid Gold tier — I pay for it myself — so on a small balance the subscription can eat the gain. It’s under Investing below. Do the arithmetic before you subscribe.

Saving without having to think about it

Acorns — rounds up your spare change and invests it automatically. I pay for it, and the reason is simple: it saves money I’d otherwise spend without noticing. (my referral link)

Investing

Robinhood — the platform I run my own experiment on. Uninvested cash is swept to FDIC-insured program banks, so it doubles as a cash account. The competitive rate requires their paid Gold subscription, which I pay for myself — worth it at my balance, but do the arithmetic on yours. And note Robinhood doesn’t pay that interest itself; the program banks do. (my referral link)

And three I recommend on merit, where I get nothing at all: Vanguard for low-cost index funds, Schwab for a full-service brokerage, and American Century — I was a happy customer there for decades.

Rates and terms move, and each of these has its own conditions. Go look at today’s numbers before you move a dollar.

A free conversation about your situation

Damon Day is an independent debt coach, and my co-host on Get Out of Debt Guy. I want you to know that before you decide anything. I receive no payment for this referral.

The consultation is free. The only time money changes hands is if you decide you want to hire him as a consultant. Go to DamonDay.com and schedule — he doesn’t cold-call anybody, and neither do I.

Or ask me, anonymously

Ask Steve — free, private, and I’m not selling anything. No account, no email, no sales pitch at the end of it.

What do you call a fake noodle?

An impasta.

Now Let’s Make Your Money Smile

Your Social Security is already protected from collectors, and your bank has to do it for you

Somebody asked me this week about being chased by collectors while living on retirement income. Worth answering out loud, because in that spot the fear does more damage than the debt.

A private debt collector cannot garnish your Social Security. Not with a judgment, not with a threatening letter, not ever. Same protection covers SSI, VA benefits, federal retirement and disability, servicemember pay, railroad retirement and FEMA assistance — the CFPB lists them all.

Here’s the part almost nobody knows. If a collector does get a court order and serves it on your bank, the bank must look back at the last two months of federal benefits that were direct-deposited and leave that money available to you. The CFPB’s own example: $1,000 of Social Security a month means “the bank must allow you to use up to $2,000.” You don’t apply. You don’t file anything. It happens because the money arrived by direct deposit.

Two real exceptions: the government can still reach Social Security for back taxes and federal student loans, and so can child or spousal support. Private creditors cannot.

I’m telling you because of what I’ve watched people do for thirty years. They cash out a 401(k) to pay a collector. They drain their last savings. They do it fearing the loss of something the law had already put beyond reach — often to pay debt a bankruptcy could have erased. That’s the expensive mistake, and it gets made in the dark.

If that’s where you are, ask me directly. Free, private, and I’m not selling anything.

The gas and carbon monoxide detector in your hallway might not go off

On August 20 the Consumer Product Safety Commission told people to stop using a “4 in 1” plug-in natural gas and carbon monoxide detector, model KH158. CPSC says it sold under eighteen brand names — ARIKON, ELECOIN, KH Alert, Sooguard, NICGOL and more — on Amazon, eBay, AliExpress, Micro Center and Snapklik from June 2024 through July 2026, for $13 to $140.

CPSC is aware of 91 reports of these failing to alarm during actual gas or carbon monoxide leaks.

Here’s why it’s in today’s email rather than filed away: the manufacturer has refused to recall them. CPSC’s warning is here. No notice is coming. No refund, no replacement, no letter. If you don’t happen to hear about it, you don’t hear about it.

So go look tonight. Plug-in combination gas/CO detector with a SELF-TEST button and three lights — green POWER, yellow FAULT, red ALARM? Unplug it, bin it, replace it with one meeting the UL 2034 standard.

Carbon monoxide has no smell. The detector is the entire warning system, and 376,974 of these are out there.

A bank failed on Friday and nobody lost a dollar

Pennsylvania regulators closed Tioga-Franklin Savings Bank in Philadelphia on Friday, and Second Federal Savings and Loan assumed every deposit. The branch reopened Monday under the new name. The FDIC’s notice says depositors “will continue to be insured by the FDIC, so there is no need for customers to change their banking relationship,” and loan customers just keep paying as usual.

Nobody filed a claim. Nobody waited on a check. Bank failure is terrifying in the abstract and boring in practice, and it’s worth watching one work. Inside the insured limits, here’s what it looks like from your side: the sign on the building changes.

Now the one you can actually go improve

The FDIC publishes what the average American bank pays. As of last week, savings accounts average 0.38% and interest checking averages 0.07%. The table is here.

Now compare that with what's actually on offer. A decent cash account pays somewhere in the region of 3.5% — and I'm using that as an illustration, not a quote, because these rates move constantly. Call it roughly nine times the national average on savings, with instant access and nothing locked up.

On $10,000, the gap between 0.38% and 3.5% is about $38 a year versus about $350. For fifteen minutes of moving money.

Both Betterment and Robinhood run cash accounts paying many times what a high-street bank does, and both are in the Bonus Section at the bottom, each with a plain link beside my referral link — use whichever you prefer.

One honest catch on Robinhood, because nobody else will tell you: the good rate needs their paid Gold tier, about $5 a month. I pay for it myself and at my balance it earns its keep — but run the numbers on yours, not mine. Roughly $60 a year means you need somewhere around $2,000 parked before the subscription pays for itself. Below that you're renting a rate you aren't really earning. Betterment's has no subscription attached.

Don't take my numbers for any of it: go and see what they're actually paying today, then go and look at what your own bank pays you. That comparison is the whole job.

Rare money chore: pure upside, nothing locked up, no catch.

Money you might actually be owed

The Money Source robocalls, $1.5 million. If this mortgage servicer called you with a prerecorded or artificial voice between February 6, 2019 and May 7, 2025 after you’d told them to stop, you’re in the class. The unusual bit: there’s no claim form. Don’t opt out and you’re paid automatically. Deadline to exclude yourself is October 7, 2026. Details.

Crossroads Trading data breach, $600,000. Notified about the February 15, 2025 breach? It’s $25 with no documentation, up to $5,000 with proof of losses, $100 if you live in California. Deadline October 13, 2026. Details.

What I published today

• New Mexico is erasing pandemic unemployment overpayments for nearly 30,000 people — there’s a waiver window, and the collection pause is broader than most people have been told.

• Your mortgage approval isn’t proof you can afford it — the federal rule saying a lender has to actually verify you can repay.

Before you go

Want the deeper version? My weekday briefing goes long on one story instead of wide on six.

And the detector — you probably know somebody who bought a cheap plug-in alarm online because it was cheap. Two-minute text.

Everything here is my read on the news, not instructions for your situation. You know things about your own life that I don’t.

Look at what today has in common. Benefits already protected, and nobody told you. A detector that won’t alarm, with no notice coming. Money you’re owed that pays out whether or not you ever hear your name. None of it is complicated. It’s just quiet — and the quiet is the part that costs people.

That’s why I still do this after thirty-odd years. Not because the news is cheerful; plenty of days it isn’t. It’s because the gap between what’s true and what people have been told is usually exactly where their money is sitting. You closed a little of it this morning just by reading to the bottom.

Now go check the detector.

Back tomorrow.

— Steve

Bonus Section

A few places I actually use, and what I get out of telling you. Each one shows a plain link and my referral link. If you use mine, the company may hand us both a small bonus. The plain link goes to exactly the same place — it just pays me nothing, and you nothing. Use whichever you like; genuinely, it’s your call.

I’ve also listed places I like that pay me nothing at all, so you can see the difference.

Cash that actually earns something

Betterment — their Cash Reserve account is the closest thing here to a plain high-yield savings account. (my referral link)

Robinhood's cash sweep pays competitively too. The good rate sits behind their paid Gold tier — I pay for it myself — so on a small balance the subscription can eat the gain. It's under Investing below. Do the arithmetic before you subscribe.

Saving without having to think about it

Acorns — rounds up your spare change and invests it automatically. I pay for it, and the reason is simple: it saves money I’d otherwise spend without noticing. (my referral link)

Investing

Robinhood — the platform I run my own experiment on. Uninvested cash is swept to FDIC-insured program banks, so it doubles as a cash account. The competitive rate requires their paid Gold subscription, which I pay for myself — worth it at my balance, but do the arithmetic on yours. And note Robinhood doesn't pay that interest itself; the program banks do. (my referral link)

And three I recommend on merit, where I get nothing at all: Vanguard for low-cost index funds, Schwab for a full-service brokerage, and American Century — I was a happy customer there for decades.

Rates and terms move, and each of these has its own conditions. Go look at today’s numbers before you move a dollar.

A free conversation about your situation

Damon Day is an independent debt coach, and my co-host on Get Out of Debt Guy. I want you to know that before you decide anything. I receive no payment for this referral.

The consultation is free. The only time money changes hands is if you decide you want to hire him as a consultant. Go to DamonDay.com and schedule — he doesn’t cold-call anybody, and neither do I.

Or ask me, anonymously

Ask Steve — free, private, and I’m not selling anything. No account, no email, no sales pitch at the end of it.

Somebody just threw a bunch of omega 3 pills at me...

But luckily, I only suffered super fish oil injuries.

Now Let’s Make Your Money Smile

Equifax is paying $100 million because it got about 4 million credit scores wrong

For roughly three weeks in the spring of 2022, a coding error at Equifax sent lenders the wrong credit scores for about four million people who were applying for mortgages, car loans and credit cards. According to the lawsuit, some scores came back more than 20 points off. Equifax has now agreed to pay $100 million to end the case — which the lawyers who brought it call the largest class-action settlement ever reached under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has the details.

Sit with that for a second, because this is the part that matters more than the money. Nobody in that group got a letter. There was no alert. If you were turned down in March 2022, or you got approved at a worse rate than you expected and figured that was just what you deserved, you would have had no way on earth to know why. You’d have blamed yourself. Most people did.

I’m telling you this because it’s the cleanest proof I’ve seen of something I’ve said for thirty years: the number these companies report about you is not a fact of nature. It’s a calculation, run by a company, and companies make mistakes.

Now the important part. You cannot claim any of this money yet. It still needs a judge’s sign-off, and only after that will there be an official website and formal notice in the mail — that’s the process the court filings lay out, and there’s no shortcut around it.

So here’s my own warning, and I’d rather be early than late on this one: if anyone contacts you this week offering to get you that settlement money — a text, a call, a site asking for your Social Security number — walk away. Settlements this size attract imitators before the real claim process ever opens. There is nothing to claim yet. Wait for the notice.

You can check all three credit reports free every week, and most people still don’t know it

Here’s the thing to actually go do. Not once a year — every week, from all three bureaus, permanently. That temporary pandemic-era program was made permanent, and the FTC says so plainly. The only authorized site is annualcreditreport.com.

I bring it up today for an obvious reason: the Equifax story is about four million people who couldn’t see something that was being said about them. You can see it. It takes about ten minutes and it costs nothing, and it’s the single highest-value ten minutes in personal finance that almost nobody spends.

And if you pull it and something’s wrong, the dispute is where people get stuck — so here’s why your TransUnion or Experian dispute isn’t working, and what to do about it.

The postcard promising veterans extra benefits is a phishing operation

The FTC put this out today. Veterans around the country are getting postcards saying they — or their spouse — might qualify for extra monthly benefits through something called the “Veterans Savings Program.”

That program does not exist.

The postcard is good, though. It often names the state you actually live in, and it name-drops real benefits like CHAMPVA or TRICARE For Life so it reads as official. Then it tells you to call right away or risk losing out. That urgency is the entire trick — they want you on the phone before you’ve had a chance to check, so they can walk you through handing over your Social Security number or your bank details.

If one lands in your mailbox: don’t call the number on it. Call the VA directly at 1-800-827-1000, a number you can verify yourself. The FTC’s alert is here.

You probably know someone this was mailed to. Older veteran, spouse of one, the kind of person who still reads their mail carefully and takes a government-looking postcard seriously. That’s who it’s built for.

How often people sue the credit bureaus, in case you thought Equifax was a one-off

Between Thursday and this morning, I counted at least 47 new federal lawsuits filed against Equifax, Experian and TransUnion — 22, 12 and 13 respectively. Most of them are ordinary people saying the report is wrong and nobody would fix it.

“At least” is doing real work in that sentence, and I want to be straight with you about why. I can only see federal court, and plenty of these cases get filed in state court where I’m not looking at all. The federal index also runs a week or two behind. So 47 is a floor, not a total. The real number is higher and I can’t tell you by how much.

What readers keep asking me

A pattern I keep seeing: parents who cosigned a student loan, the child stopped paying, and the parent found out from a collector.

Here’s what surprises almost everyone in that spot. Cosigning is not splitting the debt. You are not on the hook for half. You are fully liable for all of it, the same as if you’d borrowed the money yourself — and it’s been sitting on your credit report the whole time. For a parent near retirement, that’s the difference between a manageable problem and a genuinely frightening one, and it usually arrives with no warning at all.

If something like that is happening in your family, ask me about it directly. It’s free, it’s private, and I’m not selling you anything.

Before you go

If you’re not on my weekday briefing yet, that’s here — it goes deeper on one thing instead of wider on five.

And if one of these was useful, send it to the person it applies to. The veterans postcard one especially — the FTC’s own advice on that scam is to spread the word, because scammers never mail just one.

Everything here is my read on the news, not instructions for your situation. You know things about your own life that I don’t.

Look — a credit score got four million people quietly punished for something none of them did, and the fix took four years and a lawsuit. That’s genuinely infuriating. But the reason I’ve stayed in this work since 1994 is that the ordinary version of this story ends better than people expect. Not with a windfall, and not because anyone rides in. It ends because somebody finally looks at the actual paperwork, finds the thing that was wrong, and starts making decisions with real information instead of shame. You can do that this week. You can do it in ten minutes.

Back tomorrow.

— Steve

Bonus Section

A few places I actually use, and what I get out of telling you. Each one shows a plain link and my referral link. If you use mine, the company may hand us both a small bonus. The plain link goes to exactly the same place — it just pays me nothing, and you nothing. Use whichever you like; genuinely, it’s your call.

I’ve also listed places I like that pay me nothing at all, so you can see the difference.

Cash that actually earns something

Betterment — their Cash Reserve account is the closest thing here to a plain high-yield savings account. (my referral link)

Saving without having to think about it

Acorns — rounds up your spare change and invests it automatically. I pay for it, and the reason is simple: it saves money I’d otherwise spend without noticing. (my referral link)

Investing

Robinhood — the platform I run my own experiment on. (my referral link)

And three I recommend on merit, where I get nothing at all: Vanguard for low-cost index funds, Schwab for a full-service brokerage, and American Century — I was a happy customer there for decades.

Rates and terms move, and each of these has its own conditions. Go look at today’s numbers before you move a dollar.

A free conversation about your situation

Damon Day is an independent debt coach, and my co-host on Get Out of Debt Guy. I want you to know that before you decide anything. I receive no payment for this referral.

The consultation is free. The only time money changes hands is if you decide you want to hire him as a consultant. Go to DamonDay.com and schedule — he doesn’t cold-call anybody, and neither do I.

Or ask me, anonymously

Ask Steve — free, private, and I’m not selling anything. No account, no email, no sales pitch at the end of it.

Someone just threw mayonnaise at me.

What the Hellman?

Now Let’s Make Your Money Smile

If you have no income, your student loan payment is not zero. Not anymore.

This one changed out from under people and almost nobody has been told. Under the new Repayment Assistance Plan — the federal plan that launched July 1 — a borrower with zero income does not get a $0 payment. The law sets a $10-a-month minimum for everyone whose calculated payment comes out below that. No income exemption. The Department of Education says it in plain language in its own final rule.

Here’s the part that matters more than the ten dollars. Ten dollars is not the problem. A missed payment is. If you are sitting there believing your bill is zero because it always was, nobody is going to call and correct you — you find out when it is already late.

And there is a door here that a lot of people still have open and don’t know it. The older IBR plan still has a real $0 floor, and it forgives what’s left five to ten years sooner than the new plan does. But it closes the moment you take out any new federal loan — including a consolidation, which is the kind of tidy housekeeping people do without thinking. I wrote the whole thing up here, with the regulation quoted so you can check me.

Go look at which plan you’re actually in. Not what you think you’re in — what the servicer says you’re in.

The unsolicited package isn’t the scam anymore. The QR code inside it is.

You’ve heard of brushing — a box shows up you never ordered, because somebody used your name and address to post a fake verified review. Mildly creepy, basically harmless. The FTC flagged a new wrinkle yesterday: some of these boxes now come with a QR code and a note offering to help you find out who sent it. Scan it and you’re handing over information, or installing something.

The instinct that gets people here is a good instinct — you want to know who has your address. Just don’t let the box tell you.

If you have a lawyer, the collector is not allowed to call you. That’s the whole rule.

Two complaints landed this week that are the same story twice. In one, a Florida woman alleges that LVNV Funding and Resurgent Capital contacted her directly about a disputed debt while knowing she was represented by an attorney. In the other, a Pennsylvania woman alleges Portfolio Recovery kept up a campaign of calls after she repeatedly asked them to stop.

These are allegations. No court has found anybody liable, and I’m not telling you these two companies did it.

I’m telling you the rule, because it’s the part people don’t know: once a collector knows you have a lawyer, they’re supposed to go through the lawyer. Not you. Same with a written request to stop calling. Those aren’t favors you ask for — they’re the law, and when a collector runs over them it’s the collector with the problem, not you. I’ve never sued a collector myself. Plenty of my clients have, and won.

Quick hits.

Credit bureau lawsuits keep coming — at least 69 new federal cases against Equifax, Experian and Trans Union in the last three days alone, and that number is a floor twice over, since we only see federal courts and the index runs a week or two behind. What it tells you isn’t “sue somebody.” It’s that the dispute process has a next step, and almost nobody uses it.

And if you’re in a Chapter 13 and somebody’s suggested a title loan to get through a rough month — read this first. Short version: permission has to come before you sign, not after, and the rules differ so much by district that your neighbor’s answer isn’t yours.

What people are actually asking me.

A pattern I keep seeing: somebody sits down for dental work, and somewhere between the exam and the treatment plan a credit application appears. Not a payment plan — a credit application, with a real interest rate, signed in a chair while you’re already anxious about your teeth.

There is nothing illegal about it. But being handed credit at the exact moment you’re least able to shop for it is not a coincidence, it’s a business model. If that’s happened to you, ask me about it. It’s free and private and I’m not selling anything.

This week’s show.

Damon and I went at the big one: Bankruptcy Isn’t Failure — It’s a Financial Tool. Whether bankruptcy is a moral failure or the smartest tool on the table when the math has stopped working, and what it costs you to decide that question out of guilt instead of arithmetic.

One more thing. If you want the longer versions as they land, that’s the Weekday Briefing, and it’s free. And if the student loan thing at the top applies to somebody you know — somebody out of work, somebody between things — send it to them today. That’s the one where believing the old rule actually costs money.

This is my read and my opinion after thirty-plus years of this, not legal or financial advice for your specific situation. Your facts matter, and so does your state’s law.

Here’s the thing I actually believe, and I’ve watched it happen more times than I can count: people get out of this. Not by winning something, not by a windfall — by looking at one honest number and making one decision, and then doing it again next month. That’s it. That’s the whole trick. You’re allowed to start with the small one.

Back Monday.

— Steve

Bonus Section

A few places I actually use, and what I get out of telling you. Each one shows a plain link and my referral link. If you use mine, the company may hand us both a small bonus. The plain link goes to exactly the same place — it just pays me nothing, and you nothing. Use whichever you like; genuinely, it’s your call.

I’ve also listed places I like that pay me nothing at all, so you can see the difference.

Cash that actually earns something

Betterment — their Cash Reserve account is the closest thing here to a plain high-yield savings account. (my referral link)

Saving without having to think about it

Acorns — rounds up your spare change and invests it automatically. I pay for it, and the reason is simple: it saves money I’d otherwise spend without noticing. (my referral link)

Investing

Robinhood — the platform I run my own experiment on. (my referral link)

And three I recommend on merit, where I get nothing at all: Vanguard for low-cost index funds, Schwab for a full-service brokerage, and American Century — I was a happy customer there for decades.

Rates and terms move, and each of these has its own conditions. Go look at today’s numbers before you move a dollar.

A free conversation about your situation

Damon Day is an independent debt coach, and my co-host on Get Out of Debt Guy — you can also hear us on Spotify. I want you to know that before you decide anything. I receive no payment for this referral.

The consultation is free. The only time money changes hands is if you decide you want to hire him as a consultant. Go to DamonDay.com and schedule — he doesn’t cold-call anybody, and neither do I.

Or ask me, anonymously

Ask Steve — free, private, and I’m not selling anything. No account, no email, no sales pitch at the end of it.

Dr. Frankenstein once entered a bodybuilding competition.

It soon became clear that he misunderstood the objective.

Now Let’s Make Your Money Smile

Stop waiting for interest rates to drop. I mean it — take it off your plan.

The Fed met on July 29 and held rates at 3.5 to 3.75 percent, which is the part everybody reported. Here’s the part almost nobody did: three people in that room voted to raise them. Not cut. Raise. Because inflation still hasn’t come down to where it’s supposed to be.

Think about what that means. The argument inside the Fed right now isn’t “how fast do we cut” — it’s whether rates should go up from here. So if your plan for that credit card balance has been “I’ll deal with it when rates come down,” you’ve been waiting on something that isn’t coming this year, and every month of waiting has a price tag.

Here’s your ten minutes today: call the number on the back of your highest-rate card and ask them to lower your APR. Not a hardship program, not a settlement — just ask. Say you’ve been a customer for X years, you’re carrying a balance, and you want a lower rate. They say no plenty. They also say yes more than people expect, because keeping you is cheaper than losing you. Worst case you’re exactly where you started, ten minutes later. That’s the best-odds phone call in personal finance and it costs you nothing but the asking.

Now the one I actually want you to remember.

A debt settlement company is being sued for cold-calling people who’d put themselves on the Do Not Call registry — United Debt Settlement, and I mentioned this case in one line a couple of weeks ago without explaining why it matters. It’s an allegation, no court has ruled. But it’s the hook for something I’d tell anyone:

Almost nobody who’s actually going to help you with your debt calls you first.

In thirty years I can’t think of one. And it isn’t a coincidence — it’s the math. Since 2010, federal law says a debt relief company that reaches you by phone can’t charge you a dime until it has actually settled or renegotiated one of your debts, you’ve agreed to that deal, and you’ve made a payment on it. Three conditions, all before any fee.

Sit with that. An honest operator can’t make cold-calling pay — they’d be fronting months of work with no guarantee of a dollar. So they don’t call. The ones dialing you already decided those rules don’t apply to them, which tells you exactly what kind of company just rang your phone.

You know who in your life picks up those calls.

While I’m here — something came through Ask Steve recently that I want you to know is possible, because most people don’t.

A spouse dies. The surviving husband or wife settles what has to be settled, grieves, and moves on. Then years later — years — a credit card that belonged to the person who died shows up again. New company, new letters, new phone calls, treating it like a live account somebody owes on today.

It’s called zombie debt, and it happens because old accounts get sold off cheap and resold again, and somewhere down that chain a buyer decides a widow is worth a phone call.

Here’s the part people don’t know, straight from the FTC: family members usually don’t have to pay a dead relative’s debts out of their own money. The debt belongs to the estate. There are real exceptions — you cosigned it, or you’re the spouse in a community property state, or your state makes spouses cover certain things like some medical bills — so this isn’t a blanket free pass. But “they’re calling me, so it must be mine” is not how this works, and the person calling is not going to be the one to tell you that.

If this lands on you: don’t pay anything and don’t agree that it’s yours until they’ve put the details in writing. They’re required to. And a single payment on an old debt can restart a clock that had already run out — which is sometimes the entire reason they’re calling.

One more, and it’s today’s: if a package shows up you didn’t order, don’t just shrug. The FTC put out an alert on it this morning. It’s a brushing scam — someone mails you junk so they can post a glowing review under your name. Free stuff from the universe, right? No. For them to do that, somebody had your name and address, and “somebody” usually means a breach nobody told you about. If there’s a QR code inside offering to reveal your mystery sender, that’s not a mystery, that’s a hook. Pull your credit report at AnnualCreditReport.com — it’s free every week, and you don’t need a reason.

If the cold-call thing landed, forward it to the person you were thinking of while you read it.

Nobody gets to tell you what to do with your money. Not me, not anyone. What I can do is hand you the same information I’d want if it were my name on that credit report or my card number sitting in a stranger’s inbox — what you do with it is entirely yours to decide.

And here’s the thing thirty years of doing this has actually taught me: none of what’s in this issue is a life sentence. A bad debt gets paid off or discharged. A bureau eventually fixes the file. A scam gets reported and you move on. People get out of situations like these constantly — not with a windfall, just with one honest look and one decision, repeated. If today’s issue felt heavy, that’s the part to hold onto on the way out the door.

Back tomorrow with more of what you actually need to know.

— Steve

Bonus Section

A few places I actually use, and what I get out of telling you. Each one shows a plain link and my referral link. If you use mine, the company may hand us both a small bonus. The plain link goes to exactly the same place — it just pays me nothing, and you nothing. Use whichever you like; genuinely, it’s your call.

I’ve also listed places I like that pay me nothing at all, so you can see the difference.

Cash that actually earns something

Betterment — their Cash Reserve account is the closest thing here to a plain high-yield savings account. (my referral link)

Saving without having to think about it

Acorns — rounds up your spare change and invests it automatically. I pay for it, and the reason is simple: it saves money I’d otherwise spend without noticing. (my referral link)

Investing

Robinhood — the platform I run my own experiment on. (my referral link)

And three I recommend on merit, where I get nothing at all: Vanguard for low-cost index funds, Schwab for a full-service brokerage, and American Century — I was a happy customer there for decades.

Rates and terms move, and each of these has its own conditions. Go look at today’s numbers before you move a dollar.

A free conversation about your situation

Damon Day is an independent debt coach, and my co-host on Get Out of Debt Guy. I want you to know that before you decide anything. I receive no payment for this referral.

The consultation is free. The only time money changes hands is if you decide you want to hire him as a consultant. Go to DamonDay.com and schedule — he doesn’t cold-call anybody, and neither do I.

Or ask me, anonymously

Ask Steve — free, private, and I’m not selling anything. No account, no email, no sales pitch at the end of it.

What time did the man go to the dentist?

Tooth-hurty.

Now Let's Make Your Money Smile

Go look at what your savings account is paying you. I’ll wait.

The FDIC published this Monday. The average savings account in America pays 0.38%. Checking pays 0.07%. And on the same page, the government’s own comparable Treasury yield sits at 3.63%.

Read that again, because it took me a second too. Same dollars. Same FDIC insurance. Same you.

On $10,000 that gap is about $325 a year you’re not getting. Not because you did anything wrong — because you did nothing, which is exactly what the account is designed for. Nobody sends you a statement showing the interest you didn’t earn. There’s no line item for it. That’s why it goes on for years.

So: go look. Right now, before you finish reading this. If the number starts with a zero, you’re at or under the national average, and fixing it is a twenty-minute job you do once. If you’ve got an emergency fund sitting in a big-bank savings account, this is the single highest-paid twenty minutes on your calendar this week.

I’m not telling you where to move it. I’m telling you to know the number, because most people genuinely don’t.

Since you’ll ask: here’s where mine is, and what I get out of telling you.

Three places I actually use pay a lot more than 0.38% on cash: Betterment (their Cash Reserve account is the closest thing here to a plain high-yield savings account), Robinhood, and Acorns. I’m not quoting you a rate for any of them, on purpose — those numbers move, and Robinhood’s better cash rate is tied to their paid Gold tier, so the headline you see may not be the one you get. Go look at today’s number and today’s conditions before you move a dollar.

Now the part most newsletters leave out. I have referral links for all three, and if you use mine the company may hand us both a small bonus. So: Betterment referral · Robinhood referral · Acorns referral. The plain links above go to exactly the same places — they just pay me nothing, and you nothing. That's the whole difference: the referral version has a small bonus in it for both of us, the plain one has a bonus in it for neither. Use whichever you like — genuinely, it's your call, and I'd rather you moved your money than used my link.

And places I like that pay me nothing at all, so you can see the difference: Vanguard, Schwab, and American Century — I was a happy customer there for decades. If one of those suits you better, go there instead.

And while you’re in there: stop searching for the page where you pay your bill.

This one I’d text to my mother. The FTC put out a warning this week about bill pay impersonators, and it’s so ordinary you’d never think twice.

You go to pay a bill. You search the company’s name plus “pay.” Top result looks right. It isn’t — it’s a paid ad for a middleman with no connection to your biller, who adds a fee and forwards your money whenever they get round to it.

The FTC’s fix is two lines: scroll past the ads, and type the address in yourself. Mine’s shorter — use the address printed on your actual bill. Nobody buys ads against that one.

Worth ten seconds, because a late payment isn’t just a fee — one 30-day-late mark sits on your credit report for seven years, over a bill you paid on time.

Your loan can outlive the company that made it.

The SEC charged three former executives of Tricolor Holdings yesterday over the collapse of the Texas subprime auto lender, which went bankrupt last September. They’re accused of pledging the same car loans to more than one investor and dressing up defaulted loans as current. Allegations — nothing’s been decided.

I’m not telling you this because you owned the bonds. I’m telling you because of what people assume when a lender goes under: that the loan goes with it. It doesn’t. Your loan is somebody’s asset — when the lender fails it gets sold, and a stranger now owns your payment.

If a car loan or a card of yours has ever changed hands: keep paying, get it in writing who owns it and where the money goes, and pull your credit report a month later. Handoffs are where duplicate accounts and phantom late marks are born, and you are the only person who will ever notice.

Quick hits, because they’re worth a minute and not a paragraph.

Three claim windows are open and none of them will come find you — Pierce County Library System, Dap Health, and USAA in Michigan. File anyway, but don’t let the headline number set your expectations — divide it by everyone in the class and your check is small.

And check your cupboard: Sunbeam and Newell settled over allegedly exploding Crock-Pots, and there are three class actions over Thermos food jar stoppers. Allegations, both. Sixty seconds to check what’s on your shelf.

What I published yesterday, if you want to go deeper. The site is where I take one thing apart properly: the FTC’s $2.1 million settlement with Doxo, what to do if a collector threatens you with deportation, and what Bank of America told the SEC about its money-laundering consent orders.

One more thing. If you want those longer pieces as they land, that’s the Weekday Briefing and it’s free. And if the savings thing at the top made you go look — send it to somebody. Most people have never once checked that number, and it costs them for years.

None of this is instruction. It’s input. You know your situation better than I do, and nobody gets to make these calls for you.

One last thing, and I mean it. Whether you’re digging out or already comfortable, the money stuff that actually works is unglamorous and it’s available to everybody: know your numbers, look at the thing you’ve been avoiding, make one decision, repeat next week. Nobody gets rescued. People just start.

Back tomorrow.

— Steve

The headline about gas prices is wrong, and the real number is worse

You have probably seen a version of this in the last day: gas prices hitting the highest level ever recorded for an August. It is being reported everywhere, and it sounds like something just happened.

Here is what the actual government data says. I pulled the Energy Information Administration’s weekly numbers rather than the coverage of them, because this is a case where they disagree.

For the week of August 10, US regular averaged $4.006 a gallon. Against the week before, that is down seven cents. Prices did not spike this week. They eased slightly.

But look at the column nobody puts in a headline. Against the same week a year ago, you are paying 88.8 cents a gallon more.

That is the number that hits your budget, and it is not a “this week” story at all — it is a slow, year-long climb that never produced a dramatic day. If your household buys ten gallons a week, you are spending about $9 more a week than last summer — call it $460 a year, for exactly the same driving. Nobody sent you a notice. It arrived a penny at a time.

I am walking you through this because the shape of it matters more than the fuel. A cost that rises steadily never gets a headline, so it never gets a household meeting — while a cost that jumps once gets both. The things that quietly break a budget are almost always the first kind. Your insurance renewal, your grocery bill, your streaming subscriptions that each went up a dollar.

So do this, and it takes ten minutes: pull up the same month from last year in your bank app and compare the total on two or three recurring categories. Not the individual charges — the totals. You are looking for the gap nobody announced. Then decide, deliberately, whether you are willing to keep paying it.

And one hard-won warning, because I have watched this specific thing start real trouble: do not let a rising running cost quietly move onto a credit card you are already carrying a balance on. Fuel is the classic one, because it feels small and necessary every single time. A balance that grows $40 a month from a card you never consciously decided to borrow on is how people end up sitting across from me.

⚠ On the West Coast the same EIA table shows $5.075 a gallon, more than a dollar above a year ago. If that is you, the numbers above understate it considerably.

Bankruptcy filings are climbing, and buy-now-pay-later is making them messier

US bankruptcy filings rose sharply in the first quarter, according to Yahoo Finance’s reporting — and separately, ACA International reports that buy-now-pay-later debt is complicating those filings.

I want to be careful here: I am citing news coverage, not the courts’ own statistics, so treat the exact percentage as reported rather than verified. The direction is what I would pay attention to.

The BNPL detail is the part worth your time, and almost nobody explains it. Those four-payment plans often do not appear on a credit report the way a card does. That means two things that pull in opposite directions. Going in, people genuinely do not know how much they owe — the debt is real but invisible, spread across five apps with no statement that adds it up. And in a bankruptcy, every one of those creditors still has to be listed, which means the debt you forgot about is the debt that complicates the paperwork.

If you use these, do one thing tonight: write down every BNPL plan you have open, in one place, with the balances. Not to feel bad about it. Just so a number that currently exists only across five phone screens exists somewhere you can look at it.

Arizona wiped out a billion dollars of medical debt — and the way it works surprises people

Governor Hobbs’s office announced Arizona has erased roughly $1 billion in medical debt for its residents, per the announcement carried in the news.

Real relief for real people, and I am glad of it. But here is the “well, actually,” because the mechanics are not what most people assume.

You do not apply for this. Programs like these buy portfolios of old medical debt on the secondary market — usually for pennies on the dollar, which is exactly why a state can retire a billion dollars in face value for a small fraction of it — and then simply cancel it. If you are covered, you find out by getting a letter. There is no form, no queue, and anyone who calls asking for a fee to get your medical debt included in a relief program is running a scam.

Two things it does not do, which matter if you are in the middle of it. It does not stop a new medical bill, and it does not fix the underlying billing problem. So if you are currently fighting a hospital bill, this changes nothing about that fight — keep asking for the itemised bill, keep asking about financial assistance, and do not assume relief is coming to rescue this one.

If you are in New York City, a collection rule just got clearer

New York City’s SHIELD debt collection rule got a new compliance FAQ from the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, reported by Consumer Finance Monitor.

That is written for the collectors, not for you — but it is worth knowing it exists, because NYC’s rules on what a collector may do are meaningfully stricter than the federal floor. If you are being contacted in the city and something feels wrong, you are not limited to the FDCPA. You have a local regulator who takes complaints, and collectors operating there know it.

The one to warn someone about — and this one has a number on it

Idaho’s Attorney General says his consumer protection investigators stopped a banking scam in which a caller posing as a Wells Fargo fraud investigator talked a victim into sending $14,000 in cash to an address in Florida, per the AG’s own newsroom.

Read the mechanic again, because it is the whole lesson: the caller was not pretending to be a stranger asking for money. He was pretending to be the bank’s own fraud department, calling to help. That inversion is what makes it work. Every instinct you have about protecting your account gets pointed the wrong way, and the more responsible you are about fraud, the more cooperative you become.

So here is the rule, and it has no exceptions worth remembering: your bank’s fraud department will never ask you to move money, send cash, buy gift cards, or wire anything to “secure” it. Not once, not ever, not to a “safe account,” not to an investigator. If you hear any of that, the call is the fraud.

And the practical version, because in the moment nobody remembers a rule: hang up and call the number on the back of your own card. Not a number the caller gives you. Not a number you google. The one physically printed on your card. That single habit defeats this entire category.

Please forward this section to the oldest person you know who still answers the phone. That is not a joke about age — it is that this scam works on people who were raised to be polite to institutions.

One more piece of enforcement worth a line

The FTC announced a $2.1 million settlement with bill-payment firm Doxo over allegations it used search ads impersonating people’s actual billers and charged undisclosed fees, per the FTC’s release. Allegations, and the company settled rather than fight.

I am writing that one up properly for the site because the interesting part is not the settlement. It is what a middleman does to your payment timing. For today, just this: if you pay a bill through anything that is not your biller’s own site or your bank, go look at what it actually charges you.

One to keep an eye on

Tech layoffs have continued through 2026 at close to last year’s pace, per the running tally.

I mention it for one reason only. If you are anywhere near an industry doing this, the cheapest move available to you is the one you make while still employed — a credit line opened now costs nothing to leave unused and is far harder to get the week after a layoff. That is not a prediction about your job. It is just that the door is easier to open before you need it.

On the podcast this week

The latest episode is Your Debt Isn’t the Problem—Your Plan Is | AI, College Costs, and Paying the Right Bills, from August 13. The title is the whole argument. When somebody comes to me certain that their number is the problem, the number is usually the symptom — and the plan, or the absence of one, is the disease.

Before you go

If you want the longer version of any of this, my Weekday Briefing goes deeper on fewer things.

And if today’s was useful, forward it to one person — one you actually pictured while reading. That is the only marketing I do.

This is what I am seeing today, after more than thirty years of helping people dig out of this. Take it as one informed perspective, because you are the only one who knows your whole situation. Use it as input, never as instruction. Nobody gets to tell you what to do with your money. Not me, not anyone.

If only one thing today gets you to go and look at something, make it that year-ago comparison in your bank app. Ten minutes, nothing to sign up for, nobody to call — and you will know something about your own money you did not know this morning.

And I want to leave you with the thing I actually believe, because a day of gas prices and bankruptcy filings and scam calls can leave a person feeling like it is all happening to them. In thirty years I have watched an enormous number of people turn this around. Almost none of them did it with a windfall or a clever trick. They did it by getting one honest look at where they really stood, and then making one decision at a time, in the right order. That is genuinely all it takes, and it is available to you on an ordinary Tuesday with no money at all.

You are in better shape to fix this than today made you feel. I will be back tomorrow.

Take care of yourself.

— Steve

There’s a curfew on debt collectors, and almost nobody uses it

Ask most people what time a debt collector is allowed to call and you’ll get a shrug. The honest answer is that they think collectors can call whenever they want, because that’s what it feels like.

They can’t. Federal law puts a fence around it — nothing before 8 in the morning or after 9 at night, your local time. Some states draw the fence tighter than that.

Which brings me to today: a class action alleges that Capital One’s collection calls broke Florida law by coming in late at night. That’s the claim being made in the filing — no court has found anything yet, and I’ll tell you if that changes.

Why I’m telling you this rather than letting it scroll past: a 10:40pm call doesn’t feel like a legal violation. It feels like being hassled. So people don’t write it down, and a thing you didn’t write down never happened as far as anyone else is concerned.

So here’s what I’d do, and it costs you nothing: next time one comes in outside those hours, note the date, the time, and the number. That’s it. Three pieces of information in your phone’s notes app. If it turns into a pattern, you’re holding the only thing that makes it actionable — and if it doesn’t, you’ve lost thirty seconds.

While you’re in the mood: if you’ve ever disputed a debt in writing, pull your credit report and check that it actually says disputed on it. It’s supposed to. Collectors are required to pass that along, and whether they did is something you can see in about ten minutes — but only if you look.

If you drive a Ram 1500, go read this one now

Stellantis is recalling about 1.2 million Ram 1500 trucks over a seatbelt buckle issue.

I don’t normally run recalls, and I want to be straight with you about why this one’s here: recall notices go to the registered owner. Buy a truck used, move house, or let the registration drift, and the letter goes to somebody else’s mailbox. Which means the people most likely to miss this are the people who bought a second-hand truck — and a seatbelt is not the part you want to find out about later.

Takes two minutes. Go put your VIN into the NHTSA lookup. Then text whoever in your family drives one, because they haven’t done it either.

Money that’s sitting there with a clock on it

Settlements only feel like free money until you notice nobody sends you a reminder. Claim windows close, quietly, and the leftover cash goes back where it came from.

Open right now, all per the filings:

• O’Reilly Automotive, an $18.8 million settlement over allegedly unwanted marketing texts

• ApolloMD, $4.02 million over a data breach

• Atrium Health, $2.1 million over data privacy

• Tesla, a settlement over idle fees — the charge for leaving your car plugged in after it finished charging

Why it’s worth ten minutes of your Monday: the text-message ones are the sleeper. You almost certainly don’t remember getting those texts in 2023. The claim doesn’t care whether you remember — it cares whether your number was on the list.

⚠ Check each one’s own deadline on its official claim site before you count on it. I’d rather you find a closed window than trust my summary of one.

The Kia and Hyundai settlement everybody’s got wrong

There’s a Kia and Hyundai theft settlement still open, and it is not the $200 million one you’ve seen going around.

I wrote this up because I kept watching people see the big number, assume it’s the same thing, do the math on what their share might be, and decide it isn’t worth the paperwork. Different settlement. Different math. The one that’s actually open might still be worth your time.

→ The Kia and Hyundai theft settlement that’s still open isn’t the $200 million

If you’re deployed, or you love somebody who is

The Servicemembers Civil Relief Act is one of the strongest consumer protections in American law, and one of the worst-known. It caps interest. It stops some collection cold.

The cruel part is the timing: the people it protects are, by definition, busy being somewhere else. So the protection sits there unused, and creditors do what creditors do.

→ A creditor violated my rights while I was deployed — here’s what to do right now

Forward this one. Somebody you know has a kid deployed and has no idea this exists.

On the podcast this week: your debt probably isn’t the problem

Damon Day and I recorded one I keep thinking about — Your Debt Isn’t the Problem, Your Plan Is.

The part worth your time is the middle bit, about which bills to pay when you can’t pay all of them. Most people spread the money around thin, trying to keep every creditor a little bit happy. It feels responsible. It’s usually the worst thing you can do — you end up behind with everybody instead of current with the ones that can actually hurt you.

We also get into why bankruptcy is a tool rather than a moral failing, which I will keep saying until I’m blue in the face, and then wander into what AI is doing to the value of a college degree.

Why I’m putting it in front of you: the bill-priority thing is the single most useful hour I’ve spent on this podcast, and it’s the exact decision people get wrong in the month before they call me. If you only listen to one stretch, make it that one. I wrote the short version up the same day — pay the pit bull, not the maltese.

One more thing

I cut a section from today’s issue. There were 30 new federal cases filed against the three big credit bureaus in the last three days, and I’m not going to run the number.

A count like that is genuinely interesting to me and does absolutely nothing for you. It doesn’t change a decision you’d make, and there’s nothing to act on. From here on, if an item isn’t either teaching you something you can use or sitting on a clock, it doesn’t go in — even when it’s a number I find fascinating. You’ve got enough people spending your attention on your behalf.

Breadth here, depth there. If you want the longer version — the full write-ups, the case files, the guides — that’s what the Weekday Briefing is for. Get it here.

And if one of these was useful, forward it to one person. That’s genuinely how this list grows, and it’s the only thing I’ll ever ask you for.

— Steve

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I mentioned yesterday something was landing today, and here it is. A $120,334,500 class-action settlement — Tuccori, et al. v. At World Properties, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois — just started taking claims from anyone who bought a home listed on an MLS anywhere in the country and had a commission paid on that sale. I wrote the whole thing up here, but there’s one myth about it I want to clear up before you read anything else about it. The version going around online says this settlement is what made commissions negotiable and forced your agent to disclose the fee upfront. It didn’t. Those changes — a written buyer-agreement before you tour a home, a specific number for what your agent gets paid — came from an earlier case, Sitzer/Burnett, and took effect back on August 17, 2024. This new settlement just pays homebuyers for the old conduct; NAR’s own release says the terms “require continued compliance” with the 2024 changes, not new ones, and nobody has admitted wrongdoing. What’s real: if you bought through a broker, you may be owed money. Filing is free, all you need is your recorded deed, and the deadline is October 27. Go straight to HomebuyerSettlement.com — I already found this one being republished by claim-aggregator sites, and while I didn’t find either one charging a fee, you don’t need to find out either, because the free path is right there.

The FTC is sending $23.8 million to Grubhub drivers and diners — and if anyone asks you to “file a claim” for it, that’s the scam, not the refund

On August 12 the FTC said it’s sending 640,038 payments, about $23.8 million total, to Grubhub drivers and diners the agency and the Illinois AG say were harmed — drivers allegedly misled about what they’d actually earn, diners allegedly locked out of their accounts and blocked from redeeming gift cards. I wrote up the details here, but the sentence that actually matters is the FTC’s own: most of its cases don’t need a claim form, because the agency already has the company’s records and just sends the money. Most people get a check in the mail — cash it within 90 days. PayPal recipients get 30 days. Miss the window and it isn’t gone; call the refund administrator, Analytics Consulting, at 1-888-446-4992, and ask if money’s still in the fund. So here’s the rule this whole thing teaches: if you drove for or ordered from Grubhub and a check or PayPal deposit shows up, that’s real. If an email or text shows up first asking you to “verify your eligibility” or “file your claim,” that one’s not the FTC — that’s somebody trying to collect something from you instead of the other way around.

Things to check this week

Stellantis is recalling about 1.27 million Ram 1500 pickups, model years 2019 through 2026, because the rear seatbelt buckle anchors may not be properly attached — the kind of thing worth fixing before it matters, not after. Letters go out August 18, but you don’t have to wait for yours: check now at NHTSA.gov under campaign 26V495, or call 1-800-853-1403. The repair is free. Separately, if you bought a Tesla before December 16, 2016 with free lifetime Supercharging and you’re still a California resident, there’s a settlement over “idle fees” Tesla is accused of charging on top of that — up to $350 a person. Narrow group, I know, but if that’s you, file at TeslaIdleFeeClassAction.com before September 25. And a different kind of emergency I put a full guide up for this week, because I keep hearing about it: what to do if your property tax lien gets sold. Short version — under the Supreme Court’s Tyler v. Hennepin County ruling, nobody can keep more than what you actually owed in taxes, and most states give you a redemption window measured in months or years to pay it off and keep your home. A few states, California among them, cut that window off at the sale itself. Find out which one your state is before you assume you have time.

A number to file away, not to panic about

In the last seven days, federal courts took in at least 80 new suits naming Equifax, 31 naming Experian, and 23 naming Trans Union — busiest single day for all three was August 12. I say “at least” on purpose: these are federal filings only, a lot of this happens in state court too and nobody’s counting that, and the count itself moves as filings finish getting indexed, so treat it as a floor. What it means for you isn’t the number, it’s the reminder underneath it: getting an error fixed on your credit report is a right you can enforce, not a favor a bureau is doing you. If you’ve disputed something in writing and it’s still wrong, you’re not out of options.

The one to warn someone about

Pennsylvania’s attorney general just filed a complaint against N. Stanley Paving, Inc., a Lackawanna County contractor, alleging high-pressure sales tactics, price increases added after the contract was signed, abandoned jobs, and shoddy work. The detail that stopped me: the complaint describes a senior citizen who ended up paying $32,000 on a job quoted at $16,000, after terms got added without her consent. At least 14 people have filed complaints. Nothing here is proven yet — the AG is seeking restitution, penalties, and an injunction, and the contractor hasn’t had its day in court. But the pattern is the forward: get more than one written quote, never let anyone add a term to a contract you already signed, and if a “final price” doesn’t match the number you agreed to, stop before you pay it. If you know somebody about to hire a contractor for anything big, that’s who this is for.

Before you go

This is the fast daily sweep. If you want any one of these worked all the way through, one topic at a time, that’s the GOOD Weekday Briefing, and it’s free.

And if you know somebody who’s bought or sold a house in the last few years — forward them the settlement piece up top. Free money with a real deadline is exactly the kind of thing that gets missed.

— Steve

Share Your Money Actually

In April the government opened a portal to refund $166 billion in tariffs the Supreme Court ruled were collected illegally, and I wrote that the money wasn’t yours. That was right, and it still is for almost everybody — the refunds go to the importer of record, which is the company that actually paid the duty at the border. But I flagged one narrow exception at the time: if you personally ordered something from overseas and paid the duty yourself, you were the importer of record. That was the small print. Today it’s the story. The AP reported this morning that FedEx and UPS, which acted as customs brokers on millions of personal parcels, have started passing those refunds back to the people who paid them. FedEx says it’s returning $800 million. UPS paid $5 billion in tariffs on behalf of clients and is working through the government’s reimbursement now, which it expects to take one to three months. You don’t have to apply — the money goes straight back to the card or bank account that paid it — but FedEx will let you check by entering a tracking number on its site, and if you bought something from abroad in the last two years and paid a duty charge at the door, that is five minutes well spent. Now the part I don’t want you to miss, because it’s the same lesson as April: the overwhelming majority of the roughly $100 billion refunded so far went to businesses, and the AP reports that retailers including Amazon, Best Buy and Costco who received refunds mostly aren’t the importer of record on the goods you bought from them, and expect to put the money into price reductions rather than sending anyone a check. Maybe they will. Watch the shelf, not the press release.

Money you might actually be owed — and this one has a real deadline

Here’s a company you’ve almost certainly never heard of that may be holding your Social Security number. 700Credit is the credit-check vendor sitting behind more than 21,000 car, RV, boat and motorcycle dealerships — when a dealer runs your credit or does a soft pull while you’re kicking tires, it often runs through them. In October 2025 someone got into their dealer portal with stolen credentials, and about 5.8 million people had some combination of name, address, date of birth and Social Security number exposed. There’s now a $17.5 million settlement. If you got a notice letter, you can claim up to $2,500 for documented losses, or take roughly $50 with no proof at all, plus two years of credit monitoring that activates with a code on your notice. The claim deadline is September 22, 2026, and the final approval hearing is October 7. One caution: an earlier hearing date of December 15 is still floating around on some sites — the court moved it, so don’t pace yourself against the old one. 700Credit denies any wrongdoing and no court has found otherwise. I’ll say the quiet part anyway: you never chose this company, you never signed anything with them, and they had your Social Security number because you test-drove a car.

Worth checking if you bought a phone

Two people have filed separate class actions against ABC Phones of North Carolina, which does business as Victra — one of the biggest Verizon authorized retailers in the country. To be precise about who’s being sued: it’s Victra, not Verizon. The complaints allege that intruders got into Victra’s systems around April 22 of this year and that people weren’t told until about July, and that the company skipped basic protections like encryption. One plaintiff says Social Security numbers and financial account details were exposed; the other adds dates of birth and driver’s license numbers. None of this is proven — these are brand-new complaints, nobody has answered them, and there’s no settlement to claim. I’m flagging it now so that if a letter turns up, you already know what it’s about.

Claims worth knowing about, every one still unproven

A pattern I want you to notice: the collection law firms are getting sued, not just the collectors. Stone Canyon Law took two separate proposed class actions in a single day this week, and there are new consumer-credit complaints against Chuhak & Tecson and Andreu, Palma, Lavin & Solis — all of them law firms doing collection work. People assume the lawyer on the letterhead is somehow above the rules that bind a collection agency. They are not; a law firm collecting debts is a debt collector, with the same obligations. Also newly filed: a complaint against Ascendium Education Solutions, one of the largest federal student loan servicers, and one against United Debt Settlement. The complaints aren’t public yet, so I’m not going to guess what’s in them — I’ll tell you when I can read them myself.

The one to warn someone about

New York’s attorney general is suing what it says was a veterans’ charity that allegedly took donations meant for former service members and spent them on the people running it. If you give to veterans’ causes — and a lot of you do, especially around this time of year — this is the moment to spend two minutes before the next donation rather than two years regretting one. Any legitimate charity will show you its filings without being asked, and both the New York AG’s office and your own state’s charities bureau keep searchable registries. The tell in almost every case like this is emotional pressure on the phone with no paperwork to follow.

If you want to know what the people collecting your debt tell their investors

One from my own desk that the daily email didn’t carry. Encore Capital owns Midland Credit Management, and it is the largest buyer of charged-off consumer debt in the country — if an old account of yours got sold, there’s a real chance they own it. They just filed with the SEC and described a record debt-buying quarter. I read the filing, because what these companies tell Wall Street is a different document from what they tell you. When a debt buyer is buying at record volume, that’s not an abstraction — it means more accounts changing hands, more letters going out, and more people getting contacted about balances they thought were long finished.

Before you go

This is the fast daily sweep. If you want any one of these worked all the way through, one topic at a time, that’s the GOOD Weekday Briefing, and it’s free.

And if you know somebody who ordered something from overseas in the last couple of years and paid a customs charge on it — forward this to them. Most people have no idea that money is moving, and nobody is going to call them about it.

— Steve

I read something this week I wasn’t supposed to see — a trust department’s August newsletter, written for families wealthy enough to need an estate plan. It crossed my desk by accident, and after reading it twice, I realized the interesting part wasn’t the money, it was the advice. You’ve probably seen the headline that $124 trillion is going to change hands by 2048. Here’s the part that doesn’t get repeated: more than half of that — about $62 trillion — comes from the wealthiest 2% of households, and it’s mostly going to their own kids. The bottom half of families will split about 8% of it. So no, this isn’t a tide lifting anyone. But here’s the twist that actually matters to you: the advice in that newsletter — the stuff that supposedly justifies the fee — turned out to be things anyone can do for free. Update your beneficiary designations (they override your will, and almost nobody checks them). Talk to your kids about money instead of hiding the number. Give yourself more than a five-year horizon on anything. None of that needs a trust department. It needs you doing it this week.

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Money that might already be yours — and a rule trying to take it back

If your mortgage has an escrow account, the bank is holding your money to pay your taxes and insurance. In New York and thirteen other states, the law says the bank has to pay you interest on that money while it sits there. On May 15 the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency finalized a rule saying federal law overrides all of those state laws — national banks can now decide for themselves whether to pay you anything at all, and it took effect June 18. Ten state attorneys general, led by Oregon, sued to block it on August 11, arguing this hands big banks money that by law belongs to homeowners, while giving national banks an edge over the community banks that still have to pay it. Nothing is decided yet — this is a lawsuit, not a ruling. But if you’re in New York, California, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, or one of a handful of other states with a similar law, and you have an escrow account, this is worth two minutes: pull your last escrow statement and see whether interest is showing up on it. If it stopped, now you know why.

Things worth checking this week, because two of them have real deadlines

loanDepot just told its own investors something worth knowing if you were anywhere near its 2024 data breach. I read the actual SEC filing: the company quietly reclassified the breach’s financial risk from “not estimable” to “probable loss,” which is filing-speak for “we now think this is going to cost real money.” That’s usually a sign the company’s own math changed, not yours — if your data was in it, don’t wait on them to tell you. If you own a Keystone RV Passport Western Edition travel trailer bought in California before December 2019, a federal court ruled the company misrepresented the roof trusses as steel when they’re wood, and eligible owners can claim $2,000 — but only until August 28. And if you’re a woman who applied for a truck driving job at Central Transport since 2016 and didn’t get hired, a $5.5 million EEOC settlement opened for claims, deadline September 14.

Claims worth knowing about, every single one still unproven

A class action alleges Apple’s Hide My Email feature doesn’t actually forward mail the way it promises — worth knowing if you’ve been relying on it to keep your real address off spam lists. Ulta Salon is accused of tracking shoppers with Meta’s tracking pixel without consent. A suit claims YouTube Premium subscribers still see ads despite paying for “ad-free”. And CVS is accused of labeling toddler wipes “hypoallergenic” when they allegedly weren’t. Closer to my own beat: a new federal complaint landed against Ascendium Education Solutions, one of the country’s largest federal student loan servicers — the docket showed up this week, the complaint itself isn’t public yet, so I’m not going to guess what it says, just flagging it so you’re not surprised later. Same with a new case against Freedom Debt Relief, the country’s largest debt settlement company — I’ll tell you what it actually alleges once I can read it myself, not before.

The one to warn a friend about

New York’s attorney general just collected more than $700,000 from a private equity firm that bought a defaulted mortgage on a Manhattan condo building, then refused to pay building fees, skipped required safety inspections, and let occupancy permits lapse — while still collecting rent on the unsold units. If you own in a building where the mortgage got picked up by an investment firm after a default, that pattern — silence on repairs, silence on fees, no board handover — is exactly what got this one caught. You don’t have to wait for your own AG to notice. Write down what’s not happening and when, because that record is what makes a complaint to your state’s consumer protection office actually go somewhere.

The door most people don’t know they have

In the seven days ending today, at least 84 federal suits were filed against Equifax, at least 23 against Experian, and at least 23 against Trans Union — over things like accounts reported twice or disputes that never got noted as disputed. Say it plainly: if you’ve disputed something on your credit report and gotten a form letter back, you are not the unlucky one. That’s the median experience, not the exception. And that’s federal courts only — plenty of these get filed in state court too, which nobody tracks in one place, so the real number is higher. Thompson v. LVNV Funding LLC is on the site if you want to read a real one.

If one of these is happening to you right now

Two guides went up this week that are worth bookmarking even if you don’t need them today. If someone told you your Social Security is completely untouchable, that’s mostly true and dangerously incomplete — a private creditor genuinely cannot touch it, but the IRS can take 15% for back taxes and the Treasury can offset it for defaulted federal student loans. And if a creditor who already won a judgment against you is now demanding you show up in court and answer questions under oath about your money, that’s called a debtors exam, it is legal, and there’s a real difference between what it can and can’t force you to do — read it before the date on the notice, not after.

Before you go

This is the fast daily sweep. If you want the fuller version on any one of these — the reasoning worked all the way through, one topic at a time — that’s the GOOD Weekday Briefing, and it’s free. Separately, if you’ve been following Damon Day’s gig-work experiment, he cleared $138 multi-apping in three hours on day four by refusing to chase any offer under $40 an hour, and switched delivery zones for the first time on day five — one good order didn’t prove much, and he says so himself.

And if you know someone whose mortgage statement has an escrow line they’ve never once looked at, forward them today’s email. That’s the one most people have never checked in their life.

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— Steve

A federal court has temporarily shut down a credit repair operation the FTC says took nearly $200 million, and the FTC’s complaint describes a mechanism worth understanding, because it will outlive this defendant. The agency alleges Credit Glory and a network of sixteen related entities ran paid search ads aimed at people looking up a debt collector or creditor — so someone searching for the company that was calling them reached these defendants instead, and telemarketers let them believe they were talking to the actual collector. It alleges the operation then charged illegal upfront fees plus recurring charges people hadn’t knowingly agreed to. These are allegations; the FTC says so itself — it files on “reason to believe,” and an Arizona court will decide.

One detail deserves its own sentence. The FTC alleges the ads in some instances specifically targeted military servicemembers owing debts to military-linked creditors like the Army & Air Force Exchange Service and USAA. Somebody decided the people worth targeting were the ones with a government paycheck and a debt they were ashamed of.

Here’s the part that protects you after this case is over. Charging you before the work is done is not a gray area in credit repair — it has been flatly illegal since 1996. The Credit Repair Organizations Act, at 15 U.S.C. §1679b(b), says no credit repair organization may charge or receive money “for the performance of any service which the credit repair organization has agreed to perform for any consumer before such service is fully performed.” The fee request is the test. If money is wanted before results exist, you already have your answer.

The free version of what they were selling

What these outfits sell is disputing items on your credit report — and there’s a piece of that almost nobody uses. Two people in Indiana filed complaints this month making the same argument: Autumn Harroff sued Portfolio Recovery Associates in the Northern District of Indiana and Alexis Worthington sued the same company in the Southern District, each alleging it kept reporting a debt after being told the debt was disputed, without ever noting that it was disputed. Filings, not findings — nobody has been found liable.

Almost everybody knows you can dispute an error with the credit bureaus. Almost nobody knows there’s a second duty, and that it sits on the collector. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, at 15 U.S.C. §1692e(8), makes it a violation to communicate “credit information which is known or which should be known to be false, including the failure to communicate that a disputed debt is disputed.” Staying silent about your dispute is itself the violation. So write to the collector directly, not only the bureau: name the account, say plainly that you dispute it and why, keep a copy with proof of mailing. That letter costs a stamp. It is the thing the $200 million was allegedly charged for.

Two honest limits. Individual FDCPA statutory damages are capped at $1,000 on top of actual damages — a rights-and-record tool, not a payday. And §1692k(a)(3) lets a court award fees against you if it finds you sued in bad faith to harass. Dispute what you genuinely dispute.

Money you might actually be owed — and one you’re not

The FTC posted who it sent refund checks to in July, per Top Class Actions. Worth two minutes, because FTC refunds arrive unannounced and a real one never asks you for a fee or your bank login to release it.

Now the one you are not owed. A court threw out a class action against Mercedes-Benz over an alleged panoramic sunroof defect, Top Class Actions reports. Nothing about the vehicles changed that day — what changed is that a case some people had mentally banked as money coming stopped existing. A filed class action is an accusation, not a fund.

The ones to warn someone about

Two class actions have been filed against Frontier Airlines over a data breach, alleging it failed to protect customer and employee information. Unproven. But if a breach letter reaches you this month, the letter is not the action: freeze your credit at all three bureaus. It’s free, about ten minutes, and it is the only step that stops a new account in your name. Credit monitoring, which is what these letters offer, tells you afterwards.

There’s also an investigation into whether Comenity Capital Bank made prerecorded calls — relevant if you carry a store card, since Comenity is behind a great many of them. And the New York Attorney General is warning about a gold bar scam aimed at seniors. If an older person you love has been told to move savings into gold for safekeeping, that is the call to make tonight.

Numbers that mean the opposite of what they look like

I’ve been reading what these companies tell their investors, because that’s where the plain version lives. Synchrony’s latest quarterly filing shows late fees down, and it does not mean what you’d assume. Consumer Portfolio Services told the SEC about its car loan extensions — an extension that feels like help is also what keeps an account out of the delinquency column. And Sallie Mae described a “refinance” that, read carefully, looks a great deal like a default being repackaged.

The door most people don’t know they have

In the seven days to today, at least 85 federal suits were filed against Equifax Information Services, at least 24 against Experian and at least 23 against Trans Union. I say “at least” and mean it twice over: that index covers federal courts only, and these claims can be brought in state court too, which we don’t monitor — and federal indexing lags a week or two, so recent days are undercounted. The real number is higher and I can’t tell you by how much. What the floor already tells you: if you disputed an error and got a form letter back, you are not an unlucky exception. One of this week’s, Wang v. Transworld Systems, is on the site if you want to see one from the inside.

If one of these is happening to you right now

These are evergreen guides rather than news, so they stay out of the daily briefing by design — if you’re only on that list, you have never seen them.

If you’re falling behind on Chapter 13 payments, the window before dismissal is shorter than most people think. If a parent died in a nursing home and someone says you owe the bill, read that before paying a cent, because usually you don’t. If you were told your SAVE forbearance months still count toward forgiveness, check — for many borrowers they don’t. And if you have a private student loan from a school that defrauded you, the Holder Rule reaches further than people assume.

Before you go

This is the broad daily sweep. If you want the fuller version, one topic at a time with the reasoning worked through, that’s the GOOD Weekday Briefing, and it’s free.

And if you know somebody who has been googling the collector that keeps calling them, forward this. That is precisely the search the FTC says was being bought.

— Steve