What is ‘credit card churning’?
Here are three of the week’s top pieces of financial insight, gathered from around the web:
Problems to watch for in your will
Estate planning can be more complicated than just having a will, said Ashlea Ebeling in The Wall Street Journal. “Many people assume their will is the final word on who gets what when they die,” but there are some documents that can override wills. They include “beneficiary forms for retirement accounts, life insurance, and some bank and brokerage accounts.” Under federal law, married spouses are entitled to the 401(k) “no matter what the beneficiary form or will says,” unless they formally waive it, which must be notarized. “With individual retirement accounts, by contrast, in most states (other than California or Texas) you can name someone other than your spouse as beneficiary without a waiver.” If your insurance policy was purchased on your own, “the insurance company’s rules govern.”
A grim decline for bonds
“The bond market is back in the doldrums,” said Krystal Hur at CNN. Worry that the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates higher for longer has driven U.S. Treasury yields to their highest level in over a decade. That’s good news for anyone buying a bond today with the intention of holding it until maturity. But traders are seeing the prices of their existing bonds tank. One widely tracked exchange-traded bond fund, the iShares Core US Aggregate Bond ETF, is on pace to decline for the third straight year, something that hasn’t happened since its launch in 2003. “A flurry of new government debt issuance” has also “inundated” the market, pushing down prices.
