Dad Joke
I’m just off the phone with the school. They told me, “Your son has been telling lies in class.”
I said he must be great at it, because I don’t have any kids.
Now Let’s Make Your Money Smile
The pension check does not carry the old state’s tax bill with it. It hasn’t since 1996.
A nurse spends thirty years at a hospital in New Jersey, retires, and moves to Delaware to be near the grandkids. The pension is $4,000 a month. Before 1996, New Jersey could keep taxing that $4,000, every month, for the rest of her life, because she earned it inside New Jersey. Florida instead of Delaware, same bill. The tax followed the check across the state line. Then, on January 10, 1996, Congress passed a one-paragraph law, 4 U.S.C. §114, and the bill stopped at the border: no state may impose an income tax on the retirement income of somebody who no longer lives there. Delaware taxes that pension under Delaware's rules, and only Delaware.
That is the part most people never heard. The belief from the old days outlived the law, and it still sounds true when somebody says it: "It doesn't matter where we go. The state will still tax the pension." I have heard that sentence end more moves than any mortgage rate ever did. And they stay.
The law covers more than pensions. 401(k)s, 403(b)s, 457 plans, IRAs, government plans, the whole list is in the statute, and in 2006 Congress stretched it to most deferred-compensation plans as long as the money comes out as regular payments over a lifetime or at least ten years.
Here is how it still catches people, thirty years on. The first way is the nurse who never moves: the belief outlived the law. The second is the half-move. The statute leaves it to the old state to decide, under its own rules, whether you actually left, and the old state has every reason to look closely: the driver's license that never changed, the house that was kept, the doctors and the summers that are still there. Then a letter arrives saying you never really moved, and the tax is owed as a resident, on everything. The third is quieter. The protection for nonqualified deferred compensation is written for regular payments, so a lump sum out of that kind of plan can still be reachable by the old state. And none of it makes the money tax-free: the state you move to sets its own rules, a handful of them decide "not at all," and Social Security runs on its own.
More than one couple I knew stayed put in a state they could no longer afford because they were sure the pension would arrive with the old state's tax bill stapled to it. Thirty years of this work taught me that the expensive mistakes are rarely the ones people make; they are the ones people are sure they would be making, so they never move at all.
Somebody you know says “we’d owe California anyway.” This is the one to forward to them: a parent still in the house they can’t heat, a friend planning the rest of their life around a tax bill that was repealed before their kids were born. The statute is one paragraph, and the person who reads it this week may spend the next twenty years somewhere they can afford. If that’s somebody you know, this is the one to send them.
The average went up. Half the country didn’t feel it, and now there’s a number for that.
Nobody I know cheered when the record-high income number went around last week, and I noticed that. It isn’t cynicism. It’s arithmetic, and the Census Bureau published the arithmetic right alongside the headline.
Real median household income reached $87,460 in 2025, the highest since the count began in 1967. Same report, a few paragraphs down: income at the 10th percentile, the bottom of the ladder, did not move from 2024. Income at the 90th percentile rose for the third straight year. Since 1967 the middle and the bottom have grown about 56 percent after inflation; the top, about 121 percent. The household at the 90th percentile now brings in 13 times what the household at the 10th does. In 1967 it was nine times.
The other half of the release is the one that explains the kitchen. The official poverty rate is 10.2 percent. The Supplemental Poverty Measure, which counts what people actually pay for housing, medical care and taxes, and what benefits actually deliver, is 13.1 percent, and it runs higher than the official rate in 26 states and the District of Columbia. The gap is widest where rent is. A family can clear the official line and still be under water after the deductible.
Thirty years of reading other people’s budgets taught me that the median is a number nobody lives in; people live in what’s left on the 28th. I wrote the longer version of how an economy sets records while half its households fall behind, twice: What You Don’t Know About the K-Shaped Economy and, more recently, The E-Shaped Economy: Why 52% of Americans Are Falling Behind While Everything Looks Fine. This week’s release is the same picture with 2025 numbers on it.
One claims desk item: the phone in your pocket may owe you $25 to $95
My rule for this section is that a claim earns a mention only when the money outweighs the hassle, and this one clears it because the hassle is a serial number that lives on the Settings screen.
Apple has agreed to pay $250 million to settle a class action alleging it sold the iPhone 16 line and the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max on Siri “Apple Intelligence” features that weren’t there when the phones shipped. Apple denies the allegations and nothing has been decided against it. The claim window opened this morning: original purchasers who bought one of those phones in the United States between June 10, 2024 and March 29, 2025 can file for $25 per device, rising to as much as $95 if fewer people claim. The deadline is December 21, 2026, and the judge’s final-approval hearing is February 24, 2027, so the money moves next year, not this one.
I’ve watched a lot of people skip $25 because it felt like nothing, and then pay a $35 overdraft fee the same month because it wasn’t. The five minutes is the same five minutes.
One thing I noticed
Nearly everything in a grocery cart rode there on diesel, and diesel has been climbing. The EIA’s explainer on why is plain: tight distillate supply on top of elevated crude. When diesel moves, the produce aisle follows a few weeks later, and the produce aisle never explains itself.
What I published since Thursday’s issue
Four on the site, plus one here:
Should Your Adult Kid Pay Rent While Living at Home? — the written companion to last week’s podcast with Damon Day
Kentucky Is Erasing an Estimated $250 Million in Medical Debt for 130,000 People
TransUnion’s $8.3M Bankruptcy Remark Settlement — Claim by Oct. 30
And on Friday, the one I’ve been carrying around for a while: I Hit Rock Bottom. I’m Writing This From a First-Class Lounge.
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. A record year for the country and a flat year for half of it is not a verdict on you. Most of the people I’ve watched get somewhere good never had the top-decile year. They had an ordinary one, and somewhere in it they stopped measuring themselves against somebody else’s dashboard. The future is in your hands, but it might not be the one you think you want. It will be the one you need. That one starts this week, with one honest number on a piece of paper.
— Steve