Dad Joke
How many tickles does it take to make an octopus laugh?
Ten-tickles.
Now Let’s Make Your Money Smile
The car loan deduction that covers last year, and the form nobody had to send you
This one has a quiet gap in it, and I want you to know about the gap more than the deduction.
Treasury and the IRS published the final car loan interest rules in the Federal Register this morning. The headline is familiar by now: you can deduct up to $10,000 a year of interest on a qualifying car loan, and — this is the part most people miss — you can take it without itemizing. It runs for tax years 2025 through 2028.
Read that year again. 2025. A tax year you have already filed.
Here’s the gap. New reporting rules require your lender to send you a statement showing the interest you paid, once it hits $600 in a year. But for calendar year 2025, an earlier IRS notice let lenders off with something much softer: they were treated as compliant if they simply made a statement available to you. Available. Not mailed, not emailed — sitting in a portal, if you knew to go looking.
Several lenders asked Treasury to extend that easier treatment into 2026. In today’s rules, Treasury said no. Their reasoning, more or less: taxpayers need this number to file, and lenders have had eighteen months to build the systems. So from 2026 forward you get a real statement.
2025 is the one year that fell through the gap. Which means there are people who paid tax on interest Congress had already made deductible, for no reason other than that the piece of paper telling them never had to arrive.
So: log into your auto loan account and find total interest paid in 2025. It takes about two minutes. Then check whether the loan actually qualifies, because the rules are narrower than the dealership makes them sound:
The car had to be new to you — the original use has to begin with you. A used car fails outright.
Final assembly in the United States. The badge on the hood tells you nothing; the plant does.
The loan had to start after December 31, 2024, and be secured by a first lien on the car itself.
Income matters. The deduction shrinks by $200 for every $1,000 your modified adjusted gross income runs over $100,000, or $200,000 filing jointly — so it is gone entirely at $150,000 and $250,000.
The $10,000 cap is per tax return, not per person. Married filing jointly does not make it $20,000. I expect that one to surprise people.
If you paid qualifying interest in 2025 and left it off your return, an amended return is the remedy. Talk to whoever does your taxes before you file one — but go get the number first, because nobody is going to hand it to you for that year.
Forward this to anyone you know who bought a new car last year. They filed a normal return, nothing went wrong, and no form ever showed up — which is exactly why they would never think to check. The money is not lost. It is just sitting behind a login nobody told them about.
I wrote up the full qualification detail, including what happens with dealer demo cars and refinances, in this piece on who actually qualifies.
One loan, listed twice, and $1,080 that looks like $2,160
Most people read a credit report looking for accounts they don’t recognize. Almost nobody reads it looking for the same account listed twice.
A lawsuit filed last month in federal court in South Carolina alleges exactly that. According to the complaint, a single installment loan showed up on the plaintiff’s TransUnion report twice — once reported by the lender, Upgrade, and once by CBW Bank, the bank behind the loan. Matching open dates. Matching terms. Matching balances. The result, as alleged: one charged-off obligation of $1,080 appeared as $2,160 of delinquent debt. The complaint says both companies were told in writing and neither fixed it.
These are allegations. No court has found anyone liable, and both companies are entitled to their defense. I’m telling you because of the shape of it, not the verdict.
Modern lending has layers. A fintech brand you’ve heard of arranges the loan; a bank you’ve never heard of actually issues it. Both can report to the credit bureaus. When both do, one debt wears two faces, and every scoring model in the country counts it twice.
Go look at your own report. Two entries, same open date, same original balance, different company names — that is the pattern. Dispute it in writing, to the bureau and to both furnishers, because the written dispute is what starts the clock on their legal duty to investigate. A phone call does not.
We ran the full complaint here, if you want to see how it’s actually pleaded.
And it is not one case. In the last two days alone, at least four new federal suits were filed against Equifax and TransUnion — Illinois, California, Pennsylvania, Georgia. I say at least deliberately: that count is federal courts only, credit reporting cases can also be brought in state court, and the federal index runs a week or two behind. The real number is higher. It always is.
Things to check this week
The Consumer Product Safety Commission posted a batch on Friday. Three of them are the kind that sit in a house for months:
Loyoda adult portable bed rails — the CPSC notice says they were sold on Amazon.com from June 2025 through April 2026 for $40 to $50, and warns of entrapment and asphyxiation risk. Stop using them now. No injuries reported, and I’d rather it stayed that way. Recall details and the refund process.
XO Poppy Power Trip magnetic wireless power banks, sold at TJX and Marshalls — fire and burn hazards.
Amana through-the-wall air conditioners and heat pumps — fire risk.
A recall is a refund you have to claim. The people who get the money are the ones who check this week, not the ones who mean to.
What I published
My Private Student Loans Might Not Survive Bankruptcy the Way I Was Told
Damon Day’s Son Was Stranded at 1 AM After a $3,700 Repair Failed
EmblemHealth and NYC Have Agreed to a $53 Million Retiree Copay Settlement
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 unless I say a court decided something, and your situation has details I don’t know about. Talk to somebody who can see all of it before you act on any of it.
Here’s what I keep coming back to after thirty years of this. Almost none of today’s issue is about money you have to find. It’s about money that is already yours, sitting somewhere nobody pointed you to — a number behind a login, a refund on a recall page, a duplicate line on a credit report. The system is not built to hand you those. It is built to let you not notice them. But the looking is free, and you’re the one person allowed to do it. Go look at one thing today.
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.