The prices of groceries, gasoline, and pretty much everything else seem sky-high these days and are getting higher. There’s a silver lining to this cloud, however — at least for some people. That is, since Social Security’s monthly payments are adjusted for inflation, beneficiaries should see a sizable increase in their payments in the foreseeable future.
You’re not just imagining those inordinately high — and rising — prices
Just when you think price increases can’t get any worse, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the United States’ annualized consumer inflation rate reached a three-year high of 4.2% in May, up from 3.8% in April. Food and fuel prices led the charge, although even without these two categories, prices were still up 2.9% year over year.
And the nation’s factories, assemblers, and packagers aren’t feeling any less miserable. The BLS reported on Thursday that the U.S. Producer Price Index jumped 6.5% year over year last month, or a still-hefty 5.1% when excluding energy and food. Both figures are also at least three-year highs.
Of course, even if they didn’t know the exact numbers, almost everyone who eats, owns a car, pays utility bills, or is looking for a place to live knows everything is now getting more expensive at an accelerated pace. Seniors and retirees who count on Social Security income that’s less than what most working-age people earn may be feeling particularly pinched.
The good news is that relief is on the horizon for this particular crowd.
A strict, specific procedure
You likely realize that Social Security beneficiaries receive payment increases regularly. But, do you know how — if one is put in place — it’s determined?
It’s rather firmly structured, actually. Indeed, the Social Security program is required by law to provide an annual cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ aforementioned consumer inflation data. And not just a hand-picked, estimated figure. The Social Security Amendments of 1972 specifically require a COLA to be effective at the beginning of a new calendar year, based on the BLS’s average annualized inflation rate for the months that comprise the third calendar quarter of the previous year. This allows the Social Security Administration time to make its necessary payment adjustments.
But what about (the rare) years when there is no inflation? The program is off the hook in those years; there is no required COLA then, as was the case in 2015 (for 2016) and in 2009 and 2010 (for 2010 and 2011) due to the deflation stemming from the subprime mortgage meltdown and subsequent recession.
Fortunately, cost-of-living adjustments aren’t cumulative, meaning Social Security’s beneficiaries don’t necessarily have to wait for the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index (CPI) to “catch up” to a previous peak after a slump. The calculations are made every year for the next year alone, irrespective of prior years’ numbers.
So far, 2027’s COLA is on track to be a pretty big one
At first blush, the process appears to risk undercalculating — or even overcalculating — any given year’s cost-of-living adjustment. After all, three months isn’t a very long time compared to a full year. It’s conceivable that something unusual could take shape in just the third quarter of any given year to undermine or overinflate the following year’s COLA.
But that’s kind of the whole point of doing it this way.
While the Social Security Administration considers only the consumer inflation rates for July, August, and September when determining the following year’s COLA, those are year-over-year rates, each covering a full 12 months’ worth of price changes. They’re also the most recent price increases the program can consider in time to implement a payment increase beginning in January of the following year. Given this, these are arguably the only data inputs that retirees would want Social Security to consider… to ensure the cost-of-living adjustment is as relevant and timely as possible.
This, of course, means we don’t yet know what next year’s COLA will be; we won’t know for sure until early October, when September’s inflation data is available.
It somehow seems unlikely prices will fall dramatically between now and the end of Q3, though. To this end, assuming the average annualized consumer inflation rate of nearly 3.8% for the past three months reflects the figures that will still be in place through the third quarter of this year, look for an average monthly payment increase of about $78 for 2027, or nearly a 3.8% improvement on this year’s typical Social Security benefit of $2,071 per month.
Just bear in mind that the bigger or smaller your current benefit is, the bigger or smaller your payment bump will be when the time comes.

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With a bit of strategy, federal student loan borrowers can lower their monthly bills on the U.S. Department of Education’s new repayment plan, coming July 1.
Under the Repayment Assistance Plan, or RAP, borrowers pay a higher percentage of their income as their earnings grow. That means that finding ways to lower your pretax income by even a small amount can reduce your monthly student loan payments, said Landon Warmund, a certified financial planner and certified student loan professional at Reliant Financial Services in Kansas City, Missouri.
“There’s definitely some unique opportunities with it,” said Warmund, a member of CNBC’s Financial Advisor Council.
Figuring out how to reduce your monthly loan bill under RAP may be especially important for the millions of borrowers now forced to leave the Biden-era Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE, plan. A federal appeals court ended SAVE, the most affordable repayment plan to date, earlier this year.
Student loan borrowers need to exit SAVE within roughly 90 days of July 1, and many will see higher required payments under other plans.
“Borrowers can look to avoid these payment jumps by exploring what pre-tax benefits they have available to them at work to reduce their taxable income, which keeps them under key income numbers,” Warmund said.
Here’s how borrowers can try to reduce their payments under RAP.
How RAP calculates your monthly bill
Under RAP, monthly payments will typically range from 1% to 10% of your earnings; the more you make, the bigger your required payment. There will be a minimum monthly payment of $10 for all borrowers.
Current income-driven repayment plans, or IDRs, offer certain very low-income borrowers a $0 monthly payment.
RAP also doesn’t shield a portion of a borrower’s income for necessary expenses in its bill calculation, as other IDR plans do; instead, it determines the payment based on adjusted gross income. AGI is your total earnings before taxes, minus certain deductions.
For those who enroll in RAP, “even a single dollar difference in AGI could lead to a several-hundred-dollar impact in regard to total student loan payments over a year,” Warmund said.
For example, due to RAP’s formula, a student loan borrower with an AGI of $59,999 a year could pay about $50 a month, or $600 a year, less than a borrower who has a $60,000 AGI, he said.
How to reduce your adjusted gross income
There are several ways that borrowers may be able to reduce their AGI, and therefore lower their monthly RAP bill, said Carolina Rodriguez, director of the Education Debt Consumer Assistance Program in New York, a nonprofit that assists borrowers.
Directing a portion of your paycheck to your workplace 401(k) retirement plan or a traditional IRA — or increasing your contributions to these accounts — is one method, Rodriguez said. Keep in mind: To lower your AGI, those contributions need to be pretax or deductible, so money put into a Roth IRA or Roth 401(k) wouldn’t help here.
If a single student loan borrower contributed an additional $1,001 in a year to a pretax retirement account, lowering their AGI to $69,999 from $71,000, their monthly payment on RAP would fall to $350 from $414, Warmund said.
The RAP plan does have a lot of nice benefits if you plan accordingly.
Landon Warmund
Certified financial planner
Making pretax contributions to a health savings account, or HSA, or a flexible spending account, or FSA, are additional options to bring down your taxable wages, Rodriguez said. Companies can offer several kinds of FSAs, including for qualifying healthcare, dependent care and commuting expenses.
Meanwhile, if you’re self-employed, claiming legitimate business expenses and deductions on your Schedule C can have the same outcome, Rodriguez said.
“This can include ordinary and necessary business costs, retirement contributions and health insurance deductions,” she said.
Other “above-the-line” deductions can also lower your AGI, including the break on student loan interest.
Per-dependent savings of $50
Under the RAP plan, federal student loan borrowers can also get their monthly bill reduced by $50 for every dependent they claim, Rodriguez said. Dependents are often minor children, but can also include siblings or other relatives in specific cases, according to IRS guidelines.
Those savings should be automatic and tied to your tax filing.
“It’s based on the number of dependents the borrower claims on their federal tax return,” she said.
You may still pay more over time
Even if you’re able to lower your monthly payment under RAP, you may end up paying more than you would on other plans over the life of the loan, Rodriguez said. That’s because RAP leads to student loan forgiveness only after 30 years, compared with the typical 20- or 25-year timeline on other IDR plans.
As a result, some borrowers may want to compare their monthly bill and total payment amount on RAP to other repayment plans. However, RAP will be the only IDR plan available to student loan borrowers who take out a loan after July 1.
Borrowers with existing federal student loans may maintain access to some current IDR plans, including the Income-Based Repayment plan, or IBR. IBR borrowers are eligible for debt forgiveness after 20 years or 25 years, depending on the age of their loans.
While the Income-Contingent Repayment plan, or ICR, and PAYE, or the Pay As You Earn plan, will also remain available to current borrowers until mid-2028, neither program now results in debt forgiveness. The only reason you’d want to be in either plan, then, is if it brings you the lowest monthly payment, Rodriguez said.
If that’s the case, you can remain in ICR or PAYE until the plans expire on July 1, 2028. Afterward, if you switch into IBR or RAP, you’re entitled to credit toward forgiveness for your previous payments.
“If RAP will be your lowest option, wait for it to become available,” Rodriguez said. “But be mindful of the plan’s implications.”

Updated on Friday, June 12 at 4:22 p.m. ET — Meta’s status page indicates that all disruptions have been restored and all disruptions are now concluded.
Updated on Friday, June 12, at 1:26 p.m. ET — Andy Stone, Meta VP of Communications, posted an update on X that stated Meta services were being restored.
The Meta status page for its business services listed most of the June 12 disruptions as resolved. “We have recovered from an earlier outage impacting Ads Creation and Editing, and services have now been restored. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused.” However, the WhatsApp Business Platform still showed “High Disruptions” as of this writing.
Updated on Friday, June 12 at 1:15 p.m. ET — As of this writing, the outages for Meta’s services appear to be on their way out, at least according to DownDetector. Meta has not provided an official cause for the outage yet, however.
Some of Meta’s products had a hard time on Friday morning.
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Services like Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp all experienced temporary service outages to start the weekend. The cause is unknown at this point in time, but Meta’s VP of Communications, Andy Stone, acknowledged the outage on X.
Stone said Meta’s engineers are working on it.
In addition, the platform DownDetector recorded spikes in user error reports for Meta products on Friday. A peak of 10,000 users reported problems accessing Instagram, with the majority reporting problems with the app.
According to DownDetector users (Disclosure: Mashable and Down Detector have the same parent company, Davis), Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp all experienced problems starting in the late morning on Friday. On top of that, Meta’s status page for its business applications also noted “High Disruptions” on Friday morning, too.
Anecdotally, multiple Mashable staff members have had a hard time posting or sending messages on Instagram during this outage. It’s unclear exactly when the problem will be resolved, but at the very least, Meta is aware of it and is doing something about it.
This is a developing story…

Two events from the past week help crystallize this strange, contradictory moment for the U.S. economy.
On Wednesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the surge in energy prices had wiped out a year and a half of wage gains for the average American worker. On Friday, the public-markets debut of SpaceX made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.
That stark juxtaposition helps explain why many Americans, in survey after survey, say they no longer believe the U.S. economy is working for them. A few people are getting fabulously, unimaginably wealthy at the same time that entire generations of families worry they will never be able to afford to buy a house, raise children or enjoy a comfortable retirement.
“I don’t think the stock market is necessarily causing” Americans’ pessimism about the economy, said Stefanie Stantcheva, a Harvard professor who studies public sentiment. “But I don’t think people are looking at it and are thinking, ‘Great, this means I’m going to do very well, too.’ It’s potentially reinforcing this feeling of ‘I’m falling behind.’”
Inequality is hardly a new feature in America. But the explosion of wealth at the very top is without precedent in U.S. history. At the height of the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century, the richest handful of Americans had a net worth equivalent to about 3 percent of the country’s annual economic output, according to data compiled by the French economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez. Today, the fortunes of the same 0.00001 percent — about 20 individuals — make up roughly four times as large a share, equivalent to 12 percent of annual output.
Other economists, using different methodologies, come up with somewhat different numbers. But hardly anyone disputes the basic fact that the wealthiest few have made extraordinary gains in recent years.
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Amazing things are happening in technology, and ordinary investors are being invited to get a piece of the action.
With the SpaceX market debut on Friday, the Anthropic and OpenAI initial public offerings in the pipeline, and the sizzling tech stocks already on the market, there’s no shortage of betting opportunities.
Elon Musk ignited a frenzy with his roadshow for SpaceX, promising a future of interstellar riches from artificial intelligence combining spaceflight, satellites and orbiting A.I. data centers. I watched his presentation at JPMorgan and was entranced.
Who am I to say that cheap, virtually limitless A.I. generated from Earth’s orbit won’t happen just as Mr. Musk says it will? Intellectually, I’m willing to contemplate the possibility that he is truly leading the world to a vibrant future, on this planet, on the moon and eventually on Mars.
But from a purely investing perspective, I’m keeping my feet firmly on the ground.
As I’ve pointed out, the price being asked for SpaceX shares was exorbitant, and it rose even higher on its first day of trading. That said, the company’s stock might well rise further over the next few weeks, driven by sheer market enthusiasm. Mr. Musk reserved a double-digit percentage of the I.P.O. shares for “retail,” or ordinary, investors — as opposed to big institutions. A retail allocation of 5 percent or less has been customary in most recent public offerings, according to Jay Ritter, an economist and I.P.O. expert at the University of Florida.
But SpaceX’s price is so high that, for investors coming late to the party, the probability of a solid return in the next several years is low. Historical data provided by Mr. Ritter bears that out.
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