Dad Joke
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.