Author: Elizabeth Blessing
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OCTROT is refunding 178,000 heated blankets after cords detached and started 27 fires
The recalled product is the kind of thing that lives folded over the arm of a couch from October through March: a sherpa-lined electric throw, plugged into a wall outlet, with a small white controller and five heat settings. Households that keep the thermostat down and warm the person instead of the room buy them…
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Lettuce ran 32% above last June, and USDA sees vegetables up 6.8% this year
Lettuce costs about a third more than it did last June. Tomatoes cost roughly a fifth more. Fresh vegetables as a group ran close to 10 percent above where they sat a year earlier, and for a household that buys more or less the same list every week, the produce section is where the grocery…
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Electricity is on pace to average 18.3 cents a kilowatt-hour this year
Eighteen point three cents per kilowatthour means nothing until it is multiplied by a month of ordinary use. The Energy Information Administration’s most recent published figure puts the average U.S. residential customer at roughly 899 kilowatthours a month, which turns that rate into about $165 of electricity before taxes, fees and the fixed monthly charge…
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Medicare’s 2027 Part B premium is not set yet, whatever the $209.50 figure suggests
Search for next year’s Medicare costs and the same number comes back from a dozen directions: $209.50 a month. It appears in blog posts, in benefits explainers, in at least one page whose headline flatly announces that the 2027 premiums have been released. They have not. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has published…
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IRS Free File is open to households under $89,000 through October 15
Somewhere in a filing cabinet or a browser tab sits a 2025 federal return that was started in April and never finished. The household filed for more time, the deadline stopped feeling urgent, and the paperwork went quiet. What a lot of those filers have not been told is that the free federal filing software…
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September 15 is the next estimated tax deadline for retirees and self-employed filers who expect to owe $1,000
The federal tax calendar has one more date on it before the year runs out, and it lands on Tuesday, September 15. That is the deadline for the third estimated tax payment of 2026, and it is the one that catches people who do not think of themselves as taxpayers with deadlines at all: a…
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The IRS is retiring First Time Abate for automatic penalty relief, so eligible filers no longer have to ask
On July 8 the IRS announced that it is retiring its most widely used penalty waiver and replacing it with a process that grants the same relief before a penalty is ever charged. The old program required a taxpayer to know the relief existed and to ask for it. The replacement, called the Automatic Exemption…
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Michigan renters and homeowners have until September 30 to claim the home heating credit, and a tax extension will not help
The window to claim Michigan’s 2025 home heating credit closes on September 30, 2026, and it closes on postmarks rather than intentions. A claim that leaves the house on October 1 is late no matter how good the reason. That single date governs a benefit that reaches renters as well as homeowners, and it does…
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The Senior Citizens League projects a 3.8% raise for 2027, about $74 a month, but Social Security decides in October
A single figure has been moving through retirement newsletters and social feeds since the middle of July: a 3.8 percent Social Security raise for 2027, worth roughly $74 a month. The figure is real, the arithmetic behind it is ordinary, and the organization that produced it describes it accurately. What gets stripped out in the…
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Minnesota is adding nearly 15% to 2025 homestead refunds, and homeowners who already filed do not need to do anything
The Minnesota Department of Revenue is applying a one-time boost to 2025 Homestead Credit Refunds from inside its own processing system, which means the money reaches most homeowners without a form, a request, or a phone call. A return that is already on file gets recalculated on the state’s side, and the larger refund goes…
