The current banking crisis rolled on with two key developments in late April. The first was the release of several reports from the Federal Reserve detailing the errors that led up to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March 2023, blaming poor regulatory oversight combined with an absence of risk management for the failure. Read more
Healthy Choice: How an HSA Can Save You
A Health Savings Account (HSA) is a type of savings account that enables you to set aside pre-taxed funds to pay for qualified medical expenses. Using untaxed dollars in an HSA to pay expenses such as deductibles, drug prescriptions, copays, some dental work, glasses and vision-related care, and some other expenses can lower your overall Read more
The Debt and the Deficit Are Not the Same
The perennial political drama over raising the United States’ debt ceiling continues, with consequences of failure just being default and global financial catastrophe. So … same old, same old. Still, though politics has seemingly decided to regard fact-checking (and, maybe, facts) as outdated, this fact is important to remember: despite the bloviating, the debt and Read more
It’s Spring! A Good Time to Tidy Up Your House … and Finances
As spring arrives and the flowers bloom, this is a good time to review your finances. Actually, any time is a good time to do this. You don’t need to obsess over your budget, but it’s smart to make money check-ins a regular part of your routine, by conducting a self-audit at least once a Read more
A Matter of Trust: How the FDIC Works
You have heard it many times in those rapid-fire announcements on bank advertisements: “FDIC insured.” Before the recent high-profile bank failures, that was likely all most depositors knew about the FDIC, that it was insurance on their money. But current events have brought FDIC into the headlines over actions to protect depositors after the collapse Read more
Fault Lines: Bank Failures Cause Market Tremors
On March 10 Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapsed and was taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). This was followed by the collapse of Signature Bank (SBNY) and another takeover by the FDIC takeover on March 12. There followed a period of volatility for the banking sector, turmoil in equity and fixed income Read more