TheWalletCompass

Medicare Open Enrollment for 2027 coverage opened on October 15, 2026, and closes on December 7, 2026, the window the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced on September 28, 2026, alongside a projection that the weighted average Medicare Advantage premium will fall from $14.37 a month in 2026 to $12.00 in 2027. The premium is the small number; the large one is the plan's maximum out-of-pocket amount, or MOOP, and CMS has capped it for 2027 at $9,850 for in-network care and $14,800 for in-network and out-of-network care combined. A plan with drug coverage adds a separate Part D limit of $2,400, so the $9,850 figure now circulating as the 2027 Medicare Advantage limit is one of three ceilings, and for a PPO member who sees out-of-network doctors it is not the one that ends the year's spending. Both MOOP figures are maximums, not the amount on a given plan. Plans pick a number at or below them in one of three tiers, set by a CMS memo dated April 22, 2026, u...

On October 19, 2026, news reports said the Education Department and the Treasury were preparing to restart involuntary collections on defaulted federal student loans as soon as November, with private collection agencies doing part of the work, with no confirmation from either department. If collections resume, a borrower in default can lose part of each paycheck to administrative wage garnishment and part of each Social Security payment to a Treasury offset, and both tools are usually summed up with the same number, 15 percent. The 15 percent is a ceiling in both, but each tool has its own floor underneath it, $750 a month for Social Security and 30 times the federal minimum wage, or $217.50 a week, for pay, and for lower incomes the floor sets the amount. The deadlines also differ. A wage garnishment notice gives 30 days to ask for a hearing that holds the order back; a notice of tax refund offset gives 65 days to ask for a review. A borrower who receives both in the same week and p...

On October 12, 2026, Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano said on CNBC that the program, now 90 years old, will be around for another 90 years. The depletion dates come from the Trustees Report released June 9, 2026, which gives two of them: the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) Trust Fund in the fourth quarter of 2032, with 78 percent of scheduled benefits payable, and the OASI and Disability Insurance (DI) funds counted together in the third quarter of 2034, with 83 percent payable. For a retired worker or a survivor, the earlier date is the one tied to the check, because those benefits are paid from the OASI fund and the law keeps the two funds separate. Depletion is not the end of payments. Income keeps arriving, and the payable share slides to 62 percent by 2100 on the OASI fund, or 65 percent on the combined basis. A third number sits in the cost-of-living rule, which picks the COLA index by reading a trust fund ratio, and it reads the two funds combined, not the O...

On October 14, 2026, the Social Security Administration announced a 3.6 percent benefit increase for 2027, worth $75 a month for the average retired worker, with the first higher Social Security payment arriving in January 2027. For a beneficiary whose Medicare Part B premium is deducted from that payment, the January deposit moves by the increase minus any rise in the premium, and the 2027 premium has not been published yet: SSA says enrollees will see it starting in late November. A hold-harmless rule in the Social Security Act stops a premium increase from shrinking the deposit, but it compares dollars rather than percentages, reaches only a narrow set of checks, and even then can let the premium take the whole raise. The loose reading is that a Part B increase cannot cut into anyone's COLA. The statute is narrower: it applies only to people who meet three conditions, compares one month's deposit with the month before, and caps the premium only when its dollar increase exc...