Dad Joke
I ordered 2,000 pounds of soup today.
It was won ton.
Now Let’s Make Your Money Smile
The $1,000 retirement match in this week’s headlines has been law since 2022
Every so often a headline tells the people who don’t have a retirement plan at work that somebody in Washington finally noticed them. The one making the rounds this week reads Trump’s New Retirement Plan Could Give Workers Up to $1,000. FinanceBuzz, which wrote it, reports that an executive order directs the Treasury Department to launch TrumpIRA.gov, a government-backed site for comparing and opening low-cost IRAs, set to fully launch on January 1, 2027.
The website is new. The $1,000 is not. It’s the Saver’s Match, which Congress wrote into the SECURE 2.0 Act in December 2022, with the 2027 start date fixed right there in the law. The article itself says as much further down, where it notes the benefit “builds on” the Saver’s Match. The headline just didn’t carry that part.
Here’s how the law actually works. It matches 50 percent of up to $2,000 a year that a worker puts into a traditional IRA or a workplace plan like a 401(k), so the most anyone gets is $1,000, and the money is deposited into the retirement account rather than paid out as cash. Roth accounts don’t qualify. For 2027 the match starts shrinking for a single filer with income above $20,500 and is gone at $35,500; for a married couple filing jointly, the range is $41,000 to $71,000. Most withdrawals from retirement accounts in that year or the two before it also reduce the contributions that count. The fine print is still being drafted: FinanceBuzz reports that Treasury and the IRS asked for public comment in August, with comments due October 5.
And there’s one line almost nobody is repeating, which matters to people carrying debt. The law says the match can’t be taken through the offsets that grab tax refunds for past-due child support, debts owed to federal agencies such as defaulted federal student loans, or state tax debts.
I’ve been reading money headlines long enough to remember when they arrived on newsprint, and the word that has fooled the most people in all that time is new. A benefit announced as new sounds like a promise that could still change. One that has sat in the tax code since 2022 is something a person living on a small paycheck can actually plan around.
Somebody you know is working on a small paycheck and has decided retirement saving isn’t for people like them. This is the one I’d send them. A headline that says “new” makes most people wait to see if it’s real. This one has been in the law since 2022, it starts in 2027, and it’s built for exactly the paycheck they think disqualifies them.
Congress built a four-year window for people who got a late start. Most of them walk right past it.
Somewhere around 58, a lot of people I’ve talked with stop opening the 401(k) statement. Not because they don’t care. Because the number looks like a verdict, and at that age it feels too late to argue with it.
Here’s what most of them never hear. Starting in 2025, the law gave people in their early sixties more room to save than people in their fifties. For 2026 the IRS set the regular 401(k) limit at $24,500, and anyone 50 or older can add an $8,000 catch-up on top. But in the calendar years you turn 60, 61, 62 and 63, that catch-up is $11,250 instead. The same rule covers 403(b)s, government 457 plans and the federal Thrift Savings Plan. Then the year you turn 64, it drops back to $8,000. Four years, and the door narrows again.
Two honest footnotes, because this is where the brochure usually stops. The bigger catch-up only exists if your employer’s plan offers catch-up contributions at all, and not every plan does. And beginning in 2026, if you earned more than $150,000 from that employer the year before and the plan has a Roth option, the catch-up has to go in as Roth, which means after tax. Same savings, a bigger bite out of the paycheck than the old math.
I took Social Security at 62, so I know the early sixties from the inside, and it’s the decade where I’ve watched the most people quietly decide the race was over. It isn’t. A catch-up exists at all because behind is where most people are at 60, and somebody in Congress finally wrote that fact into the tax code.
And I’ll say the part a retirement ad won’t. Plenty of people I’ve known at 60 couldn’t find an extra $11,250 if they turned the couch over twice, and a few of them were carrying card balances at rates that made any savings math look silly. I’ve watched people pour money into a 401(k) with one hand while paying 24 percent with the other, and I’ve watched people cash the whole 401(k) out to make the calls stop, which is the one I wrote about in The $400,000 Mistake. And for the people tempted to stop contributing altogether just to breathe for a few months, I wrote the longer version of what that actually costs in Should I Stop Contributing to My 401(k) to Have More Money Each Paycheck? The window matters. It just isn’t the first thing.
Help filing a VA disability claim is free by law. Somebody is still charging for it.
You know a veteran. Maybe you are one. And there’s a decent chance that somewhere in their feed this week sits an ad promising a higher disability rating and more money every month, from a company that wants a cut of the increase.
Here is the belief that needs to expire: that the people who charge are the ones who get results. The law is plain about the first claim. Under 38 U.S.C. §5904(c)(1), nobody may charge a fee for help before VA issues its initial decision on the claim. And the VA itself says the help from an accredited veterans service organization representative on a benefit claim is “always free”. Accredited attorneys and claims agents can charge only after that first decision, with a signed fee agreement on file.
This week a veterans service organization’s proposed class action accusing two Texas firms of charging disabled veterans illegal fees for help getting higher ratings was moved into federal court in Washington, D.C., according to Law360. Those are allegations, and nothing has been decided. It isn’t the first time this has come up: in January, the Texas attorney general got a judgment requiring VA Claims Insider to forgive more than $6.8 million veterans had been charged, which I covered in Texas AG Wins $6.8M Debt Forgiveness for Veterans Scammed by VA Claims Insider.
Thirty years in this work taught me that the help people pay the most for is usually help they were already entitled to for free; it just wasn’t advertised as hard. The VA’s own find-a-representative tool is the unglamorous door, and it’s the one that doesn’t send a bill.
What I published yesterday
Five on the site, none of them in Monday’s issue:
Is Shopping an Addiction? A Recovery Coach and I Compare Notes on Money and Debt — recovery coach Greg Downs and I, side by side
A Private Student Loan Company Is Suing Me. Here’s What to Do Right Now.
If one of these was news to you, it’s news to somebody you know, and that’s the whole reason this exists. It’s free at yourmoneyactually.com, and I don’t sell the list. The places I actually use for my own money, and what I get out of telling you, are on one page where they’ll always be.
Nothing here is advice for your specific situation. It’s what I’d tell a friend over coffee, and I’d tell the same friend that the details of their own life outrank anything I’ve written here.
One more thing. If you’re 60 with less saved than you meant to have, or 45 and further behind than your brother-in-law, you are not late to your own life. Most of the people I’ve watched come back from behind never caught up to anybody. They stopped keeping score against people who were never behind, and they did the next honest thing with what they had. That turns out to be enough more often than you’d believe. I’ll be back tomorrow.
— Steve