The mortgage pain point

And more of the week’s best financial advice

A house.
(Image credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Here are three of the week's top pieces of financial advice, gathered from around the web:

The mortgage pain point

Interest rates on the most common type of mortgage topped 5 percent last week for the first time since January 2011, said Wolf Richter at WolfStreet, and another point higher will hit the "pain threshold" for the housing market. Thirty-year fixed rates for "conforming loans" — mortgages for single family homes priced below $453,100, with a 20 percent down payment — are now at 5.05 percent, up from below 4 percent in 2016. While that's still a historically low number, it's likely to rise as the Federal Reserve steadily lifts the interest rate it charges to banks. A 6 percent rate would take mortgages close to where they stood in the housing bubble. That "will block a considerable number of potential buyers from buying at current prices." Cities where prices have "surged" as much as 55 percent from their housing bubble peak — including Seattle, San Francisco, and Denver — could be hit particularly hard.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Child care for Starbucks workers

Starbucks this week began providing its employees with 10 days a year of heavily subsidized backup child and senior care, said Benjamin Romano at The Seattle Times. If an employee's child care falls through — if school is canceled, for example — the worker can put a child in a day-care center for $5 a day, or hire in-home care for $1 an hour. Starbucks says the program will help its 180,000 U.S. employees "come to work with fewer worries." Many companies have cut child-care benefits over the past 20 years: only 3 percent of employers now offer subsidized child-care centers, down from 9 percent in 1996.

Hailing a hospital ride

Ride-hailing services could help shrink the $14 billion a year that Americans spend on ambulance rides, said Austin Frakt at The New York Times. A trip in an ambulance can cost thousands of dollars, "and a lot of it may not be covered by insurance." Studies also find that nearly a third of rides are inappropriate — ambulances cart many people with minor injuries. For nonemergency medical transportation, Uber and Lyft might be a better and cheaper option. Both companies now offer services that let health-care providers order rides for patients. Or you could hail a car with your own app. "An advantage of arranging your own ride is that you can direct it to a hospital or doctor's office of your choosing." Ambulances only take patients to hospitals "and typically to the nearest one."

To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us