Category: Taxes and Retirement

An Offer in Compromise (OIC) is an IRS program that lets you settle tax debt for less than the full amount owed — but it's not a shortcut for people who simply don't want to pay. The IRS only accepts offers that reflect what it believes it could realistically collect…

Filing early to get your refund sooner is smart, but it comes with a real risk: missing a late W-2 or 1099 that arrives after you've already submitted your return. That mismatch can feel like it's guaranteed to trigger a flag or refund delay — but that's not always true.…

Schedule C is the form that reports income and expenses from a business you run as a sole proprietor or single-member LLC — think freelancing, consulting, an Etsy shop, or any other side hustle where you're not formally incorporated or partnered with someone else. If your business is structured as…

Every state, U.S. territory, and D.C. sets its own maximum weekly workers' compensation benefit — the highest amount an injured worker can receive, regardless of how much they earned before the injury. These caps are recalculated every year (and sometimes twice a year), tied to each state's average weekly wage,…

Summer EBT — also called SUN Bucks — is now a permanent federal program that puts grocery money on a card for kids during summer break, when school meals aren't available. It's in its third year in 2026, and the benefit amount and list of participating states have both changed…

For tax year 2025 (filed in 2026), H&R Block is the strongest mid-market alternative to TurboTax — meaningfully cheaper across every tier, with a comparable guided interview experience and one thing TurboTax cannot offer: the option to walk into a physical office if you want a human to take over.…

Every December, I go through the same three-step process on my taxable brokerage accounts: figure out where my realized gains and losses stand, decide what to sell to offset them, and recheck the numbers before December 31. It's one of the simplest, most repeatable tax moves available to any investor…

TurboTax is still the most widely used tax software in the country. For tax year 2025 (filed in 2026), it has made some real changes worth knowing before you pay — or decide to go elsewhere. The product lineup has been simplified, there are new deductions under the One Big…

If you've been claiming the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC) at the reduced post-pandemic level for the past few years, there's good news: it just went up again, and this time it's meant to stay. Starting with the 2026 tax year, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA)…

Home energy costs keep climbing, and for households on the lower end of the income scale, that's not an abstract budgeting problem — it's a choice between heating the house and paying for something else. The good news is that federal and state energy assistance programs exist specifically to help.…

After submitting your tax return, you may see a message referencing code 1242 and Tax Topic 151 when you check your IRS refund status. Naturally, this can cause stress and worry about what happens next. Here's what it means, next steps, and the expected timeline. Get the latest money, tax…

If you've seen ads for "free Medicare grocery cards" — or had one and lost it this year — here's the straight story for 2026: those benefits got much harder to get. The federal pilot program (VBID) that let many Medicare Advantage plans hand out grocery allowances based on income…

"Maximize your tax refund" gets searched every filing season, but it's worth being precise about what that actually means. A refund is just the IRS returning money you already overpaid through paycheck withholding or estimated payments — getting a bigger one isn't really a win if it means you gave…