It’s your money. Here’s what you actually need to know about today.
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