Posts by Katy Willis

Your teenager picked up a summer job and came home with $4,000 in tips by August. Your spouse covered overtime shifts most of the spring. You finalized an adoption last year and the legal bills are still trickling into your inbox. Whatever your family’s situation, there’s a real chance the federal government owes you money […]

Your credit score reads 510, or it doesn’t exist at all. You just got turned down for an apartment, or a cell carrier wants a $400 deposit before they’ll give you a phone plan, or a car lot quoted you 23 percent interest on a used Corolla with 90,000 miles on it. None of that […]

Claim Social Security at 62, the earliest age allowed, and the agency locks your check in at 70 percent of what you would have received at your full retirement age of 67. Not for a few years. Seventy percent, for as long as you live. Plenty of people do not get a clean choice in […]

July is hard on the grocery budget in sneaky ways. Cold drinks disappear faster, kids are home more, guests stop by, and one cookout can turn into three extra store runs if you are not stocked. Sam’s Club is useful here because the right under-$15 bulk buys cover the everyday stuff: pantry meals, freezer backups, […]

Your aunt kept a shoebox in the hall closet for forty years. Inside: a stack of bubblegum cards, a board game with the corners gone soft, and a bath toy shaped like Ringo Starr with most of the paint worn off his face. She always meant to throw it out. She never did. Beatlemania produced […]

It’s July 3rd, you have no plans for dinner, and a cooler that is still sitting empty in the garage. Eating out this summer costs more than it used to. Restaurant menu prices were running about 3.5 percent higher in May 2026 than they were a year earlier, which makes a casual holiday weekend a noticeably […]

A family of four following the USDA’s own moderate grocery budget is laying out around $1,350 a month before a single birthday cake or backyard cookout gets added to the cart. July piles on top of that: grilling season, Fourth of July plans, and weeks of kids eating lunch at home instead of at school. […]

If your paycheck is not keeping up, starting over can feel risky. It can feel even riskier in your 50s, when you may be helping grown kids, aging parents, or both. Healthcare is one of the few fields where age can work for you. Calm communication, patience, steady judgment, and life experience matter when people […]

Two separate Social Security deposits land in your joint account this month, and the total feels smaller than two full careers should add up to. You start running the math against numbers you’ve seen thrown around online, and your household doesn’t match them. For married households in 2026, the real figure is $3,208 a month, […]

Your mom’s old Pyrex is still in the cabinet. The cassette deck has been sitting in the garage since you swapped it out for a Discman sometime around 1991. The doll with the cloth body and the funny signature on its bottom got passed down from a cousin and nobody ever threw it out. None […]

Remote jobs that pay real money are harder to sort through than they used to be. A lot of listings are low-paid support work, sales jobs with shaky commissions, or vague tech roles that disappear after one budget meeting. The safer bet is often boring work tied to rules, records, claims, healthcare, insurance, audits, and […]

July parties have a way of making the cheap stuff add up. A cookout sounds simple until you need plates, cups, serving bowls, table covers, ice, and something to keep the snack table from looking like a garage sale. Dollar Tree is useful here because many of the basics are still priced low enough to […]

I can’t believe it’s July already. It just doesn’t seem possible that we’re already into summer and heading toward fall. Seems like barely any time since we were shopping for supplies for our New Year’s Resolutions, yet here we are getting ready for July 4th cookouts. And ALDI welcomes in the new month with everything […]

Someone pays into Social Security for 35 years, plans to file at 67, and dies at 63. The retirement check they were counting on never gets paid out to them, and their family is left wondering what happens to that money. Here’s the short version. The benefit itself doesn’t pass to anyone as a lump […]