Main Street Dollars

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When HUD sets a fair market rent for an area, that number becomes the ceiling a Housing Choice Voucher will cover there for the entire fiscal year, whether or not the local housing authority thinks it reflects what units actually rent for. This year’s notice includes a formal way to challenge that number before it…

Rhode Island regulators also cut a utility’s legal-expense recovery by $440,766 in the same order

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in Consumer Rights

Inside the same August 21, 2026 order that produced more than $170 million in bill credits for Rhode Island Energy customers, the Rhode Island Public Utilities Commission also did something much smaller and far less noticed: it told the utility that ratepayers won’t be covering $440,766 of the legal costs it wanted to recover. It’s…

Fake car dealership websites are taking real deposits for cars that do not exist

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in Fraud & Scams

A dealership website looks legitimate, the listed car looks real, and the price feels fair, so a buyer wires a deposit and waits for a call to come pick up the keys. Except the website was never the dealer’s. In a consumer alert published September 1, 2026, the Federal Trade Commission warned that scammers are…

The FTC says a postcard offering veterans a bigger monthly benefit is a scam

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in Fraud & Scams

The Federal Trade Commission is warning veterans and their families about postcards showing up in mailboxes nationwide that promise extra monthly benefits through something called the “Veterans Savings Program.” According to the agency, that program is not real, the postcards are not from the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the entire point of the mailer…

An 83-year-old woman pleaded guilty to running a $10.9 million scheme that cost 204 investors their savings

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in Fraud & Scams

An 83-year-old Lexington, Massachusetts, woman pleaded guilty this month to running a $10.9 million Ponzi scheme built on promissory notes she kept selling for more than a decade after state regulators had already stripped her company of the license it needed to make money. Roughly 204 investors lost their savings, and more than two dozen…

Every phone bill carries a universal service charge, and the FCC is asking whether to cap the $266 million operator

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Somewhere on most phone bills, wireless or landline, sits a line usually labeled “Universal Service” or “Regulatory Recovery Fee.” Few people know what funds it or who runs it. The Federal Communications Commission just opened a formal review of exactly that question, asking whether the company that administers the multibillion-dollar universal service program, and spent…

Mortgage rates rose to 6.71 percent, higher than a year ago, and the 15-year loan reached 6.04 percent

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in Housing & Rent

Freddie Mac’s weekly mortgage survey, released September 3, 2026, put the average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at 6.71 percent, and the 15-year fixed-rate loan at 6.04 percent. Both numbers are higher than the week before, and both are higher than where rates sat a year ago. For anyone house-hunting or trying to time a refinance, the…

Rhode Island held a utility to a 9.275 percent profit rate

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Buried inside a much larger utility rate order is a single percentage that shapes what every Rhode Island Energy customer pays for years to come: 9.275 percent. That’s the annual return regulators say Rhode Island Energy is allowed to earn on the equity portion of its investment in the state’s electric and gas delivery system,…

One state just ordered a separate rate class for power users above 20 megawatts

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Rhode Island regulators have told the state’s dominant utility to build an entirely new pricing category for its biggest electricity customers, the kind of scale a data center or a large industrial plant represents, and to have it ready before the year ends. It’s a narrow, technical directive buried inside a much bigger rate case,…

Rhode Island regulators are sending more than $170 million back to utility customers, with credits starting in October

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