Andrea Woroch, a consumer savings expert in Bakersfield, California, told me she earned $60 in cash-back rewards through one of the apps last year, which made it easy for her to purchase gift cards for her children’s teachers at no extra cost to her. “Let that cash accumulate then put it toward shopping,” she says. “I love getting free money.” So do I. So I decided it was finally time for me to try out a cash-back app, just in time for my holiday shopping. Picking the right appFirst, I had to choose the right one for me. NerdWallet’s review…

Delinquencies on auto loans are expected to stabilize this quarter and decline in the final three months of 2025 as the overall economic picture improves and consumers are feeling better about their personal financial positions, according to a report released Wednesday by global information and insights company TransUnion. The TransUnion 2025 Credit Forecast predicts the percentage of auto loans more than 60 days delinquent this year will come in at 1.45%, just about flat with the 1.42% rate in 2023, but then fall to 1.38% in the fourth quarter of 2025, a seven basis points improvement. What’s happening is some…

The festivity of December is replaced all too quickly by the due dates of January, when the bills from holiday spending and travel arrive. This kind of financial hangover can make the start of the year a little less joyful, but there are ways to prevent it.“People often go into the holiday season without a plan. They might know who they want to give gifts to, but may not put numbers to it or think of what they want to spend overall, and that’s where people get into trouble,” says Rob Wurzburg, a Chicago, Illinois-based financial advisor at Forum Financial…

The boom in generative artificial intelligence touched off in late 2022 has changed our lives in a number of ways — and the job market is no exception. December of that year saw the release of the first consumer version of ChatGPT — an app capable of writing high-school, if not college-level, essays in seconds. Since then, ChatGPT creator Open AI has released several upgrades of its signature software, which hit 100 million users a week within its first year while inspiring a host of other tech companies to enter the field. Cue existential crisis. Workers began worrying about the…

Money meets mission in America’s latest healthcare frontier. Currently, 1 in 5 children experiences a mental health condition, while more than 50% of these young patients cannot access appropriate care. It’s numbers like these that have sparked a gold rush among investors like Khadijah Robinson, General Partner at Fictive Ventures, to support entrepreneurs like Hafeezah Muhammad, CEO of Backpack Healthcare, an A-I driven mental health platform for children, to transform the industry into a catalyst for innovation and representation. The Breakdown You Need To Know: Youth mental health care’s current investment landscape is quite telling as startup investments jumped from…

The incoming Trump Administration has been sending mixed signals about the fate of Medicare. But if Trump advisers and GOP lawmakers are serious about slashing government spending it is hard to see how they will ignore the program, which last year cost $850 billion and accounted for about one out of every six dollars the federal government spent. Trump’s problem: Cutting Medicare spending risks the fury of both recipients and providers. And any effort to accelerate the shift to Medicare Advantage, which has strong support among Trump advisers, could increase federal spending even as it limits the government’s role in…

There are quite literally tens of millions of limited liability companies, partnerships, and other entities that are facing a year-end deadline to make the new Beneficial Ownership Information (“BOI”) as mandated by the Corporate Transparency Act (“CTA”) and the regulations of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (“FINCEN”). Awash in these government acronyms are many private entities that have already filed and a veritable tidal wave of entities that are prepared or preparing to file by that deadline. Or maybe not. As this deadline has approached, over a dozen cases have been filed in the U.S. District Courts challenging the legality…

Welcome to NerdWallet’s Smart Money podcast, where we answer your real-world money questions. In this episode: Learn how to refinance your mortgage, manage credit card debt, and navigate home equity with practical tips and strategies.When is the right time to refinance a mortgage? How can you use a HELOC or home equity to your advantage? Hosts Sean Pyles, freshly returned from time off to focus on the CFP exam, and Sara Rathner discuss mortgage refinancing, home equity, and credit card debt management to help you make smarter financial decisions. But first, they share an update on Sean’s CFP journey and…

The Biden administration is preparing to reopen two student loan repayment plans as soon as next week. The move could provide more options for borrowers seeking student loan forgiveness. Since August, at least eight million of borrowers have been in repayment purgatory due to a legal challenge targeting the SAVE plan. SAVE is the latest in a series of income-driven repayment, or IDR, options that tie a borrower’s monthly payment to their income and family size. SAVE was designed to be far more beneficial and affordable than older IDR plans, with lower payments, a generous interest subsidy, and loan forgiveness…

Ever feel like flight prices are all over the map? So does the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The consumer watchdog agency recently issued an order to eight companies seeking information to see how dynamic pricing(adjusting fares based on demand)and surveillance pricing (adjusting fares based on your personal data) are used to set airfare. The good news is that you can enlist a few easy tricks to avoid the eyes of big data and save on your next flight. The Two Faces of AI Pricing Let’s start by defining the terms: Dynamic pricing adjusts fares based on external factors like demand,…