Category: Saving & Banking
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The prime rate rose to 7% from 6.75% after the Fed’s September hike, lifting rates on cards and home equity lines tied to it
A quarter-point decision at the Federal Reserve on Sept. 16 reached household borrowing within a day. U.S. Bank raised its prime lending rate to 7.00% from 6.75%, effective Sept. 17, and the Fed’s H.15 table lists the bank prime loan rate at 7.00% for every business day of Sept. 21-25. Borrowing that follows prime moves…
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Nano Banc’s failure will cost the FDIC’s insurance fund about $114 million, while depositors move to Sunwest Bank
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation expects Nano Banc’s collapse to cost its insurance fund about $114 million, even as the failed California bank’s depositors move over to Sunwest Bank without losing access to their money. The estimate comes from the FDIC itself, reported by the American Bankers Association’s Banking Journal, and reflects the gap between…
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Regulators closed California’s Nano Banc, and Sunwest Bank took over its customers’ deposits
California regulators closed Nano Banc on September 25, 2026, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation turned to Sunwest Bank to take over the failed lender’s accounts. The Irvine-based bank’s roughly $686 million in deposits move to Sunwest Bank, based in Sandy, Utah, without depositors needing to open new accounts to keep insured balances protected. For…
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Federal student loan borrowers who enroll in autopay by September 30 get a 1 percentage point rate cut through June 30, 2028
Federal student loan borrowers have until the end of this month to lock in a temporarily larger interest-rate discount just for paying automatically. The Education Department is offering a 1 percentage point rate reduction to borrowers enrolled in autopay, more than four times the discount that normally applies, but only to those who sign up…
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The 2027-28 FAFSA opens by October 1, and some people who already have a bachelor’s degree can now get Pell Grants for job training
Federal Student Aid plans to open the 2027-28 Free Application for Federal Student Aid to every applicant no later than Oct. 1, 2026, and the form arrives with a change that breaks from a long-standing Pell Grant rule. For the first time, some applicants who already hold a bachelor’s degree, ordinarily disqualifying under the Pell…
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Parents taking out new Parent PLUS loans can borrow no more than $20,000 a year per student and $65,000 in total
Parents planning to borrow for a child’s college costs this fall are running into a ceiling that did not exist before this year. Federal Parent PLUS loans first disbursed on or after July 1, 2026 are capped at $20,000 per dependent student per year, with a $65,000 lifetime limit for that same student, according to…
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New student loan plan borrowers wait 30 years for any balance to be forgiven
Federal student loan borrowers taking out new loans now have a single income-driven repayment option, and it is built around a much longer payoff clock than the plans it replaced. The Repayment Assistance Plan, available since July 1, 2026, sets any remaining balance to be forgiven only after 30 years of qualifying payments. For households…
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More than 50 companies have committed to put money into their workers’ children’s Trump Accounts, Treasury said
More than 50 companies had committed to contributing money into their employees’ children’s Trump Accounts, the U.S. Department of the Treasury said in a pair of statements this summer. Treasury first announced the figure when the accounts formally launched July 4, 2026, and repeated the identical count more than a month later, on August 11,…
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The first wave of SAVE student loan borrowers must pick a new plan by September 29, and a $170 payment can jump to $650 to $1,150
Borrowers in the first wave of the SAVE repayment plan’s wind-down have until Sept. 29 to choose a new federal repayment plan, and the payment jump waiting for some of them is steep. Forbes reported that one example payment shifts from $170 a month under SAVE to somewhere between $650 and $1,150 once a borrower…
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A lawsuit says the Education Department still reports $4.6 billion in cancelled student debt on more than 300,000 borrowers’ credit files
A federal lawsuit filed Sept. 24 accuses the Department of Education of leaving $4.6 billion in cancelled student debt on the credit files of more than 300,000 borrowers whose loans were supposed to have been wiped out. The suit, Woods v. Department of Education, says loans tied to three shuttered for-profit schools, ITT Technical Institute,…