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Rising rents are one of the main drivers in the recent bout of inflation. They are also spurring many renters to try to buy a home as quickly as possible, the Wall Street Journal reported. Average monthly rents listed in the U.S. jumped more than 14% year over year in December, climbing to $1,877, according to data from Redfin. In many major cities, including Austin, Texas, and Miami, rents increased by more than 30%. Economists still recommend buying a home as a way to stave off inflation and build wealth, though it is hardly easy. Buyers are already contending with rising home prices, decreased inventory, bidding wars and the prospect of higher mortgage rates. Many renters are staying on the hunt nevertheless. They are redoing the math on renting after seeing their monthly payments go up and rushing to get a home — any home — to outrun coming rises in mortgage rates and future rent increases. The pressure on renters is coming from many directions. Higher rents are eating into buyers’ down-payment savings, while rising home prices mean they need to come up with a bigger down payment to compete with other buyers. As of January 2022, the median home price increased to $357,300, up 14% year over year, according to Redfin.

Washington state Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler’s adoption this week of a rule prohibiting insurers from using credit scoring to set rates for auto, homeowner and renter insurance has already drawn a legal challenge from insurer groups, the Associated Press reported. The American Property Casualty Insurance Association, the Professional Insurance Agents of Washington, and the Independent Insurance Agents and Brokers of Washington on Wednesday jointly filed two legal actions — an administrative challenge and a superior court lawsuit — seeking to stop the rule, which is set to take effect March 4 and last for three years after the end of pandemic-related federal and state emergency financial protections, whichever is longer. Kreidler’s office started the process of implementing the permanent rule — announced Tuesday — after an emergency rule the commissioner issued last year was struck down by a court, which found there was no justification to bypass normal rulemaking procedures. Kreidler said he’s also proposing a new rule that would require insurers to provide policyholders with a written explanation for any premium change. He said that once federal pandemic protections end, people who have struggled financially over the past two years are at risk of have delinquencies show up on their credit reports, and noted that insurers charge good drivers with low credit scores nearly 80% more for mandatory auto insurance.

Joe Biden said during his presidential campaign that he would reduce student debt for millions of Americans, but his allies remain divided on the issue, and some of his supporters are losing hope he will deliver, the Wall Street Journal reported. Nearly 43 million Americans carry some form of student debt. As a candidate, Mr. Biden endorsed canceling $10,000 in student debt per borrower through legislation and proposed forgiving tuition-related federal debt for people who earned undergraduate degrees at public colleges and universities, as well as schools that historically serve Black and minority students. All told, Americans owe around $1.6 trillion in federal student loans and more than $130 billion in private student loans, according to the data firm MeasureOne. Legislative efforts to forgive student debt have sputtered in Congress, and progressive lawmakers are ratcheting up pressure on Mr. Biden to take executive action, calling on him to cancel up to $50,000 in debt per borrower. Many Republicans oppose debt cancellation. House Republican lawmakers argued in a letter last year that doing so would be “an affront to the millions of borrowers who responsibly repaid their loan balances.”

Rental prices across the country have been rising for months, but lately the increases have been sharper and more widespread, forcing millions of Americans to reassess their living situations, the Washington Post reported. Average rents rose 14 percent last year, to $1,877 a month, with cities like Austin, New York and Miami notching increases of as much as 40 percent, according to real estate firm Redfin. And Americans expect rents will continue to rise — by about 10 percent this year — according to a report released this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. At the same time, many local rent freezes and eviction moratoriums have already expired. Higher rent prices are also expected to be a key driver of inflation in coming months. Housing costs make up a third of the U.S. consumer price index, which is calculated based on the going rate of home rentals. But economists say there is a lag of 9 to 12 months before rising rents show up in inflation measures. As a result, even if inflation were to subside for all other components of the consumer price index, rising rents alone could keep inflation levels elevated through the year, said Frank Nothaft, chief economist at real estate data firm CoreLogic.

As employers seek to hire and keep workers in a challenging job market, more are weighing offering help with student debt repayments as a job benefit, the New York Times reported. That’s good news for student loan borrowers because a freeze on federal student loan payments, part of the government’s pandemic relief effort, is scheduled to end on May 1. Millions of borrowers — many of whom haven’t made loan payments in nearly two years — will once again have to start paying their monthly bill. Student debt repayment programs were a hot topic in 2019, but companies’ interest ebbed in the pandemic, said Craig Copeland, senior research associate with the Employee Benefit Research Institute, as the pause on federal student debt payments temporarily took pressure off borrowers. Employers shifted their focus to programs offering more immediate help, like emergency savings and hardship payments. But there are signs of renewed interest among both borrowers and employers as the pause expires and employers seek to hire and hold on to increasingly emboldened workers. The institute’s 2021 survey of employers’ “financial well-being” benefits found that about 17 percent of large employers — those with 500 or more workers — offered some form of student debt assistance. Of those, nearly a third (30 percent) offered direct loan subsidies and an additional 40 percent said they planned to start offering direct help in the next year or two.

Nearly one-third of undergraduates borrow money from the federal government to pay for college. That’s about 43 million Americans who owe a staggering total of nearly $1.6 trillion in outstanding student loans, CNBC.com reported. A new survey found that 54% of federal student loan borrowers said taking on that debt was not worth it. Overall, however, 44% said taking on that debt was worth it, according to the CNBC + Acorns Invest In You Student Loan Survey, done in partnership with Momentive. (The online poll was conducted Jan. 10-13 among a national sample of 5,162 adults.) Many millennials and Gen Xers are far more skeptical. Some 63% of respondents ages 35 to 44 said, considering their current situation, said it was not worth it to take out federal student loans. The average loan amount for federal student loan borrowers is $36,510.

A new report released yesterday by the Student Borrower Protection Center, an advocacy group, indicates that as much as $50 billion in debt, colloquially referred to as private student loans and held by 2.6 million borrowers, could actually be wiped away in bankruptcy court, MarketWatch.com reported. Over the past several years, attorneys, legal scholars and even bankruptcy judges have started to think more creatively about whether debt borrowers took on in the course of their education is eligible for discharge in bankruptcy. One attorney in particular, Austin Smith, has made a career of challenging the notion that all student debt stays with a borrower following a personal bankruptcy filing. So far, three courts of appeals have sided with Smith, indicating his clients’ debts may be eligible for discharge in bankruptcy. The analysis comes out of this growing body of legal research and court rulings. Though federal bankruptcy court theoretically offers a clean slate from financial obligations, Congress exempted federal student loans from discharge through bankruptcy decades ago and private student loans in 2005. For years, borrowers and their attorneys who tried to get the debt wiped away typically argued it was imposing an undue hardship on the borrower — a carve out in the law that made the debt dischargeable, but was a notoriously hard standard for borrowers to meet.