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Loan officer on the variables brokers can control amid rate volatility
“No funds get lost on that versus if you do a permanent rate buydown from a seller through seller concessions. Then if you refinance, those funds are gone,” she said. “So there’s just different tools that we can use.”
The decision between the two comes down to timelines and market expectations. Eddy said she typically walks clients through a straightforward calculation: divide the total cost of the buydown by the monthly savings it generates to arrive at the breakeven point in months.
If that figure runs to 24 or 36 months or beyond, the math may not support it. Buyers who understand how to use rate buydowns and seller concessions effectively are better placed, she said, than those taking their cues from headlines about mortgage rates alone.
FHA loans, meanwhile, are a product worth revisiting, Eddy said – both for buyers and for the realtors she works alongside.
“I’m letting my realtors know: don’t be afraid of an FHA loan, because we were not seeing the rates in FHA going up as much as we were with the traditional conventional loans,” she said. “So those could be a better opportunity and a better option for buyers currently.”
Amazon Promo: Get $20 Credit When You Spend $75 on Select Pet Products
Amazon Promo: Get $20 Credit When You Spend $75
This article contains Amazon affiliate links.
Amazon is offering a new promotion that gives eligible customers a $20 Amazon credit when they spend $75 or more on qualifying pet products. There are more than 200 eligible items included in the promotion.
Offer Details
Spend $75 or more on qualifying products and get a $20 Amazon credit.
PROMO PAGE
You can mix and match qualifying products to reach the $75 spending requirement.
Guru’s Wrap-Up
This works out to about 26.7% back if you spend exactly $75, so it can be a good deal if pet products you already need are included.
Just make sure the items are shown as eligible for the promotion and verify that the offer is applied at checkout before completing your purchase.
Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases made through this article. Using links on the site for Amazon purchases is the best way you can support the site as you normally can’t earn cash back for these purchases. But, you should still check shopping portals such as Rakuten, TopCashback, RebatesMe, ShopBack and others for possible cashback. Your support is always greatly appreciated!
Taxpayer-funded pro-Trump ads violate laws against ‘publicity and propaganda,’ legal experts say
The White House has spent days fiercely defending three taxpayer-funded advertisements that glorify President Donald Trump and are nearing at least $1.5 million in public spending, calling them public service announcements like those used in past administrations.
“Don’t let the Fake News get away with their lies about our epic Public Service Announcements that have been running on tv,” White House communications director Steven Cheung posted on X on Sunday.
But the Republican administration’s ads attracted mounting criticism on Monday, including from members of Trump’s own party.
“It shouldn’t be paid for with taxpayer dollars,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters.
“It would not have been something that I would have done. And I know that the White House is not covered by the same guidance that we are, but it’s not something that I would have done,” said Sen. Mike Rounds, another South Dakota Republican.
Multiple legal experts consulted by The Associated Press said the ads appear to run afoul of federal statutes, including a law against congressionally appropriated funds being used for “publicity or propaganda” and a law that limits the partisan political activities of government employees.
They said the new ads, which are airing on network and cable TV and streaming, differ from other administrations’ PSAs because they aren’t designed to help Americans access any specific program.
“You watch all three ads, they’re sheer propaganda,” said Richard Painter, a former White House ethics czar under Republican President George W. Bush. “This is increasingly looking like what authoritarian governments do to promote their leaders.”
The heightened scrutiny comes as the Trump administration has increased spending on the ads and bought time on popular TV shows, including college football and National Football League programming. It remains unclear which part of the government is supplying the funds.
With both chambers of Congress led by Republicans, any oversight would likely have to come from Trump’s allies, decreasing the likelihood of hearings or other accountability efforts before November’s midterm elections.
Three ads have aired in less than a week, totaling well over $1M
The first ad in the campaign, which began airing last Wednesday, features clips of Trump talking about defeating communism interspersed with onscreen text promoting the “largest tax cuts in history,” “reigniting American manufacturing” and a call to “defend law and order and police.”
Later in the week, a second ad began running, showing scenic videos of Mount Rushmore at night with quotes and clips from Trump’s Fourth of July weekend speech there honoring the country’s 250th anniversary.
The latest of the ads, a spot first aired over the weekend, is virtually identical to an ad for Trump’s Republican reelection campaign in 2024. It shows him walking down a hallway as his voice can be heard warning of a “final battle” against “globalists” and “warmongers.”
All three ads end with a message that says: “Paid for by the U.S. Government.” The White House hasn’t responded to inquiries about which part of the government is paying.
According to AdImpact, which tracks media spending, the spots have so far cost more than $1.4 million and run across a wide range of TV networks around the country. The actual amount spent could be significantly more, depending on whether networks classified the ad as a political ad.
The ads are different from past PSAs, experts say
In defending the campaign, the White House published a list of PSAs from recent Democratic and Republican administrations.
Among the examples it cited were Bush’s Republican administration touting a Medicare law, Barack Obama’s Democratic administration promoting Affordable Care Act subsidies and Joe Biden’s Democratic administration running ads promoting COVID-19 vaccinations.
“The announcements are very clearly not campaign ads; President Trump is not on the ballot and there is no call to action,” the White House wrote. “Instead, the announcements are a reminder for Americans to love their country and know why it’s worth defending — at home, at the border, and abroad.”
Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said in her view the new ads differ from the examples the White House provided because they aren’t aimed at helping members of the public benefit from specific government programs.
“These ads are nothing more than government propaganda, aimed at helping Trump,” she said.
Painter, who joined the Bush administration after the Medicare PSAs went out, said that ad campaign toed the line on appropriateness because it included misleading information about Medicare Part D. But he said Trump’s campaign is a far more egregious violation of the statute that blocks congressionally appropriated money from being spent on publicity or propaganda.
“There’s nothing in here about a particular policy that’s at all focused,” Painter said of Trump’s ads. “One of them is just about the evils of the deep state. Another one of them is about communists and Marxists.”
In its support for the ads, the White House also referenced the administrations of President Woodrow Wilson and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, both of whom used posters, radio and film to rally the country during World Wars I and II.
James Kimble, a communication professor at Seton Hall University who studies domestic propaganda, said it’s true that Wilson’s Democratic administration used propaganda to rally Americans. But he said most Americans no longer view its actions in a positive light.
“By almost any objective measure, looking back, we find what they did pretty repulsive,” he said.
Skepticism of the campaign grows on the Hill
Top Democrats on the Senate and House appropriations committees last week wrote to the White House demanding the ads be taken down and requesting more information on how much money was spent to create and air them.
In the days since, more than a dozen Democrats and a handful of Republicans have spoken up to further criticize the ads. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the latest ad “an absolute violation of what a democracy is supposed to look like.”
“Americans sat down to watch football, not to be force-fed Trump’s propaganda on their own dime,” he said in a Senate floor speech Monday.
Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday that no public official should spend public money on private ads for themselves.
And Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican who lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger, had his own harsh words for the administration on Monday.
“Don’t worry, using taxpayer dollars to run ominous campaign ads of the President has been done before and is completely legal… in banana republics,” he wrote in an X post.
The Republican chairs of the Senate and House appropriation committees didn’t respond to requests for comment.
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Unauthorized Pets in Rentals: What They Cost Landlords
I want to tell you about a puppy.
It was a mixed-breed puppy, which is the dog version of a mystery box (you don’t know exactly what’s inside, and I’m not convinced the dog does either). It was not house-trained. It was also staying at one of my properties, and nobody told me.
Someone snuck it in, so I found out about the puppy around the same time I found out about everything it had done. Those are two things I typically prefer in reverse order. This one chewed through baseboards, ruined floors, and kept going until the bill hit about $7,000. On a rental cash-flowing $300 a month, that’s almost two years of cash flow eaten by a puppy (in the baseboards’ case, literally).
(Before anybody from the rescue world emails me: I’m building a dog-first hotel, and this is a pro-dog article. It’s also an anti-surprise article).
What bugs me is how avoidable most of it was. If that puppy had been disclosed and screened, we’d have known what was coming and planned for it.
Every landlord eventually meets their own version of this puppy, and $7,000 turned out to be the cheap version. The expensive versions come down to what your paperwork can prove, which, for an animal nobody told you about, isn’t much.
You’re Not the Only One Who Got Surprised
PetScreening surveyed 673 property managers and leasing pros for its 2026 State of Pets in Rental Housing report. Unauthorized pets came out as their top pet problem.
The same report found that only 43% of renters say they have a pet, compared with 71% of U.S. households, according to the American Pet Products Association. That’s a 28-point gap. Either renters are less into pets than everybody else, or plenty of dogs are living off the books, which is the report’s theory too.
Usually, nobody’s running a con. Someone adopts a puppy in month seven and never thinks to call you. A girlfriend’s dog comes over for a weekend in February and is somehow still there at Easter.
The Bills Come Later
Insurance usually won’t touch pet damage to the unit. Standard renter’s policies exclude it, and no adjuster in America considers a puppy an act of God (except maybe Air Bud). Chewed baseboards and a carpet that smells like a kennel get filed under preventable wear. That leaves your security deposit doing a job plenty of landlords assume insurance is doing.
Bites are the bigger number. Insurers paid $1.86 billion on 28,450 dog-related injury claims in 2025, averaging $65,450 per claim, according to the Insurance Information Institute and State Farm. On that same $300-a-month cash-flowing rental, a single average claim eats up about 18 years of cash flow.
The tenant’s renter’s policy is supposed to pay for a bite first. Plenty exclude certain breeds or any dog with a history of bites, and it gets messier if the tenant never told their insurer either. If you didn’t know the dog existed, you never asked for proof of coverage. Your own landlord policy may have animal exclusions, too, and it’s better to find that now than in a denial letter.
Disputes come down to paperwork
I’ll use Texas as an example because that’s where my properties are. Once a tenant moves out and provides a forwarding address, Property Code 92.103 starts a 30-day clock for the deposit refund. Anything you keep needs a written, itemized list under 92.104, and normal wear and tear doesn’t count.
If they sue, 92.109 puts the burden on you to prove the deductions were reasonable. Miss the 30 days and the law presumes bad faith. That clock does not care how busy your month was. A bad-faith finding costs $100 plus three times what you wrongly kept, plus the tenant’s attorney’s fees.
Say you keep $600 for floor damage, your list goes out on day 34, and a judge rules against you. Now you owe $1,900, plus a lawyer you never hired.
If the animal were never disclosed, you would have even less to work with. There’s no pet addendum or description of the animal, and nothing signed showing the tenant knew your rules on pet sitting or adopting mid-lease. “I’m pretty sure those scratches weren’t there” won’t carry much weight when the burden of proof is on you.
(Outside Texas? Your state has its own deadlines and penalties. Look them up before a move-out forces the issue.)
That neighbor email is Exhibit A
In Texas, owning the house doesn’t automatically make you responsible for a tenant’s dog. Liability usually turns on what you knew about the dog being dangerous and whether you did anything once you knew.
Now picture the neighbor’s email saying the tenant’s dog charged her kid at the mailbox again. That email is evidence you knew. You can’t unread it. Attorneys in bite cases love a written complaint like that, especially next to a lease rule nobody enforced.
Three Houses, Three Rulebooks
Nobody sets out to run three different pet policies. It happens one house at a time.
- House A has the good pet addendum and move-in photos.
- House B has a one-line “no pets” clause.
- House C is on a lease somebody downloaded in 2019.
Each one looks fine on its own. Together, they read like a group project where the members never met.
That works until those leases have to back each other up in front of a judge or a fair housing investigator. They notice when similar situations got handled differently.
Assistance animals and ESA’s make this more urgent. HUD withdrew its assistance animal guidance in September 2025. A May 22, 2026, memo narrowed federal enforcement to animals individually trained for disability-related work or tasks. State laws didn’t change; residents can still sue on their own, and attorneys are telling landlords to be careful with denials.
With the federal approach changing twice in eight months, this is not the place to freestyle. Have an attorney in your state review how you handle these requests.
One Pet Process for Every Door
The fix is boring: Run the same pet process on every property and keep the record. It’s free for housing providers, and more than 28,000 property management firms and communities use it. On a long-term rental, it looks like this:
- Everyone Goes Through It: That includes residents with no animals. Their profile is free, takes a few minutes, and has them acknowledge your rules on pet sitting, visiting pets, and getting a pet mid-lease. That’s the signature you’ll want when the weekend dog is still around at Easter.
- Every Animal Gets a File: Pet owners upload photos and vaccination records, then attest to your policies and their pet’s history, including bites. You get a FIDO Score, a paw rating of the pet’s housing risk built from more than 35 data points. It won’t make the decision for you, but it helps you make it the same way at every property.
- Assistance Animals and ESAs Get Their Own Lane: Requests go to PetScreening’s in-house review team, which verifies the documentation with the healthcare provider. Residents don’t pay a profile fee, and you’re not improvising on a legal question that’s still moving.
- Re-Up at Renewal: Have every resident refresh their profile every year. That’s how you meet the new puppy at renewal instead of at move-out.
- One Dashboard for Every Door: Every animal and signed policy lives in one place, and it integrates with property management software, including Buildium, Rent Manager, AppFolio, and Yardi. When the neighbor emails, you can pull up that dog’s file instead of guessing.
If a property manager runs your doors, try this: Pick three random units (not the three you know are fine) and ask for the animal record on each. If it takes more than a few minutes, that’s your gap.
Back to That Puppy
None of that $7,000 was the puppy’s fault. A rescue that isn’t house-trained yet is just being a puppy. The problem was that no one on our side knew it was there, so no one had a plan.
So yes, still pro-dog, still anti-surprise. Most residents with pets will do this right if you give them a clear, single process, and that costs way less than the surprise.
Get the animals on paper before you have a puppy that has an appetite for baseboards.
Live Nation to open 4,400-capacity Nashville venue The Truth on October 1, with sold-out Miranda Lambert show
Live Nation‘s new Nashville venue, The Truth, opens on Thursday (October 1).
The 4,400-capacity venue, from Live Nation and AJ Capital, is located in Nashville’s Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood.
Miranda Lambert will play the opening night, a sold-out, one-night-only show, Live Nation said on Monday (September 28).
Three further sold-out shows follow, from Malcolm Todd, Role Model, and Freya Skye.
The venue’s calendar through the end of the year also includes Jack White, The Chicks, Sting, The Smashing Pumpkins, HARDY, Beck, GloRilla, Tedeschi Trucks Band, Bleachers, Limp Bizkit, Foster the People, Goose, Orville Peck, Jodeci, and Stephen Wilson Jr., among others.
The Truth takes its name from songwriter Harlan Howard‘s description of what a good song needs: “three chords and the truth.”
“Our aspiration for The Truth is simple: to create a venue worthy of the city that inspired it,” said Sally Williams, President of Nashville Music & Business Strategy at Live Nation. “We want fans to feel connected to the music and artists to feel genuinely welcome and cared for.
“We want The Truth to feel unmistakably Nashville – rooted in its extraordinary musical legacy and reflective of the creative community shaping its future.”
Williams joined Live Nation in 2019 after nearly 20 years at Ryman Hospitality Properties and Opry Entertainment Group.
Her roles there included General Manager of both Ryman Auditorium and the Grand Ole Opry.
The Truth was designed by Blueprint Studio, Live Nation’s in-house design and development group.
The venue is built across three tiers, and Live Nation says no fan will be more than 150 feet from the stage.
In the Lyric Lobby, a custom chandelier projects the lyrics of whichever artist is performing that night.
Upstairs, the Set List Studio uses a letterpress from the 1950s to print each night’s setlist for fans.
Live Nation also commissioned five local printmakers to create original artwork for the backstage artist areas.
The two-story Vinyl Room, a listening lounge modeled on 1970s Japanese listening rooms, features artifacts selected in collaboration with neighboring United Record Pressing.
Harlan’s, the venue’s mezzanine whiskey bar, stocks bottles from 34 Tennessee whiskey makers.
Live Nation says more will be added, in what it describes as “one of the largest collections of Tennessee whiskey served at a music venue.”
The company has also made multi-year commitments to the Nashville Songwriters Association International (NSAI) and the W.O. Smith Music School.
NSAI Executive Director Bart Harbison has previously said: “Live Nation’s generous financial support for NSAI will help us continue the work we do for the songwriting profession.”
Students from W.O. Smith, which sits just up the street from the venue, will be the first musicians to play The Truth’s stage, at a soft opening ahead of October 1.
Founded in 1984, the school provides music education to children from low-income families, according to Live Nation.
“The Truth is a prestigious addition to Music City, and we are grateful for Live Nation’s commitment to music education,” said Dr. Valerie Cordero, Executive Director of W.O. Smith Music School. “Our student musicians have worked incredibly hard on their repertoire.
“Being the first to perform on this stage will be an achievement that they remember for the rest of their lives.”
The venue is also working with Humphreys Street, a Wedgewood-Houston social enterprise that provides jobs and mentoring to local teenagers, which will supply artists and crews backstage with custom coffee and soaps.
Live Nation first unveiled The Truth in October 2025.
At the time, it projected that the venue would generate $74 million in economic impact each year, support 430 jobs, and contribute $6 million annually in state and local tax revenue.
The Truth sits on Chestnut Street as part of AJ Capital Partners‘ Wedgewood Village mixed-use development.
The opening forms part of a wider US venue build-out by Live Nation.
In June 2025, the company said it planned to invest $1 billion in 18 new and renovated US venues over the following 18 months, with Nashville among the markets it listed.
At its investor day in November 2025, Live Nation said it had 48 large venues in its pipeline, at a capital cost of around $5.2 billion.
Of those, 28 were planned for markets outside the US.
The company has said it expects capital expenditures of $1.1 billion in 2026, with $800 million of that directed toward venue expansion and enhancement.Music Business Worldwide
Borrowing Money to Invest: What Physicians Should Know First
A friend called me recently. A few of his investments had slowed down, one had stopped paying entirely, and we spent twenty minutes working through what the losses might look like and whether he could write any of it off.
Then he mentioned, almost in passing, that the money he’d put in wasn’t his. He’d borrowed it.
That changed the conversation completely. We weren’t talking about investments that might underperform anymore. We were talking about payments that were due either way.
If you’re a physician, you’ve probably had this option in front of you. Banks like our income and they like the credential, so the offers tend to arrive before you go looking. A home equity line on a house that’s appreciated. A line of credit against your brokerage account. Margin. A practice loan.
And when a deal shows up and the cash isn’t sitting there, borrowing looks like the obvious answer.
Sometimes it is. But the thing that usually determines how it turns out isn’t the investment. It’s the loan.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, legal, or investment advice. Any investment involves risk, and you should consult your financial advisor, attorney, or CPA before making any investment decisions. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The author and associated entities disclaim any liability for loss incurred as a result of the use of this material or its content.
Is it a good idea to borrow money to invest?
The short version: it depends almost entirely on whether the debt is attached to the asset or attached to you.
A mortgage inside a real estate deal is normal. It’s non-recourse, it’s secured by the building, and if the deal fails the lender takes the property and that’s the end of it.
A loan you signed personally to fund your piece of a deal is a different thing entirely. It has your name on it. The investment can go to zero and the loan doesn’t go anywhere.
Those get talked about as if they’re the same tool. They’re not.
You’re signing two agreements, not one
When you borrow personally to invest, you take on two obligations that have nothing to do with each other.
The first is the investment. Up, down, or zero. That’s the risk you evaluated.
The second is the loan. It has no idea what the investment is doing. It’s due on the first.
So you’ve made one side of this optional and the other side mandatory.
Here’s the version most people run. You borrow at 7% and put it into a deal projecting a 10% or 12% preferred return. Three to five points of spread, and the investment covers the payment.
But a preferred return isn’t a guaranteed return. It tells you where you sit in line. It doesn’t obligate anyone to pay you.
A sponsor can pause distributions to hold cash, build a reserve, or cover a rate cap that got expensive. Sometimes that’s exactly what a good operator should do.
Your lender doesn’t pause anything in response.
The cash flow that was supposed to cover your debt turns out to be the most interruptible piece of the whole arrangement.
Which dollars actually make the payment?
Before you borrow for any investment, answer this specifically. There are only two honest answers.
The investment pays it. True for stabilized rental property and some private credit. Even then, stress it. What happens if distributions stop for a year?
Your clinical income pays it. True for stocks, crypto, pre-IPO shares, most value-add real estate during the improvement period, and anything else that doesn’t distribute.
If it’s the second one, you’re not doing arbitrage. You’re making a directional bet financed by your W-2, with interest accruing whether you’re right or not.
That can still be a reasonable thing to do. It’s just not what most people think they’re doing.
What kind of debt are you actually using?
The interest rate matters less than who controls the loan.
Margin loans. Callable daily. Your broker revalues the collateral continuously and can liquidate without asking. FINRA sets the maintenance floor at 25%, but most brokers hold you to more, and they can raise their own requirement whenever they want.
Securities-backed lines of credit. Similar mechanics, slightly more flexible terms, still secured by assets the lender can reach.
HELOCs. Secured by your home. Usually variable. And banks retain the right to reduce or freeze the line, which they did at scale in 2008, to borrowers who were current on their payments.
Personal and practice loans. Fixed payment, full recourse, nothing to seize but nothing protecting you either.
Debt inside a deal. Non-recourse, secured by the property, ends with the property.
The first four all reach you. The fifth doesn’t. That’s the line that matters.
What happens if the investment goes against you?
It breaks in one of two ways.
You get sold
If your debt is callable, the lender picks your exit.
Account drops below maintenance, you get the demand, and if you don’t post capital the position gets liquidated. You don’t negotiate the timing.
And the timing is the whole problem. Margin calls happen at bottoms. That’s what a bottom is.
The SpaceX IPO is a clean recent example. It priced at $135 on June 11, 2026, opened at $150, and ran as high as $225 over the following weeks. Then it reversed, closed below its IPO price in mid-July after a Starship delay, and bottomed at a close of $108.27.
It’s trading around $148 now.
Buy at $200 with cash and you had a rough summer. You’re down some, you didn’t enjoy it, and you still own the shares.
Buy at $200 on margin and you were liquidated in the low $110s. The loss is permanent and you watched the recovery from outside.
That investor may have been completely right about the company. It didn’t matter, because being right later wasn’t available to them.
With your own money, being early and being wrong are different outcomes. With borrowed money, they’re the same one.
You get stuck
The private version has no margin call, which makes it feel safer.
You draw on a HELOC and invest in a syndication or fund. No daily price, no maintenance threshold, nobody forcing a sale.
Then distributions pause. The payment continues. And you can’t exit, because there’s no real secondary market for private LP interests. Where one exists, you’re taking a serious discount and you usually need sponsor consent.
The lender can’t come after the investment. It isn’t pledged to them and they couldn’t sell it anyway.
They come after you. The house securing the line, the brokerage account, whatever the guarantee reaches.
Now you’re holding two problems that don’t offset. The investment may recover. The debt is indifferent either way.
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Can you write off the losses and the interest?
This is usually where the conversation starts, and the answer is less generous than people expect. Worth running past your CPA, since it turns on your full picture.
Interest on money borrowed to invest is generally treated as investment interest expense. It’s deductible, but only against net investment income, and only if you itemize. Net investment income is a narrower category than most people assume, and it typically excludes qualified dividends and long-term capital gains unless you make a specific election that costs you the preferential rate.
So a physician with a large margin balance and a portfolio producing little current income often can’t deduct the interest this year at all. It carries forward, which helps eventually, but eventually doesn’t pay this month’s bill.
HELOC interest has its own wrinkle. Interest on home equity debt isn’t deductible as mortgage interest unless the proceeds went into the home. Used for investing, it may be treated as investment interest instead, with all the same limits.
And capital losses offset capital gains, with $3,000 a year against ordinary income beyond that. Against a physician’s income, that’s close to noise.
The tax code does not make you whole on a leveraged position that went badly. It softens the edge, slowly.
The real cost of leverage
The usual framing is that leverage magnifies returns in both directions. That’s true and it’s incomplete.
The better framing is that leverage takes away your ability to wait.
For most physicians, patience is the actual edge. High stable income, no outside investors, nobody forcing redemptions. You can hold something through a bad eighteen months when an institution can’t.
That’s worth more than three points of spread. And a personal loan is the fastest way to give it up, because it puts a deadline on a decision that never needed one.
Debt inside a deal is ordinary. Debt that funded your entry is a different instrument with a different risk profile.
Knowing which one you’re holding is most of the work.
Were these helpful in any way? Make sure to sign up for the newsletter and join the Passive Income Docs Facebook Group for more physician-tailored content.
Peter Kim, MD is the founder of Passive Income MD, the creator of Passive Real Estate Academy, and offers weekly education through his Monday podcast, the Passive Income MD Podcast. Join our community at the Passive Income Doc Facebook Group.
Disclaimer: I am not a CPA, attorney, or financial advisor. The information in this post is for educational purposes only and should not be construed as tax, legal, or financial advice. Please consult a qualified professional about your specific situation before making any decisions.
Further Reading
U.S. Bank $300 Business Savings Bonus
Update 9/28/26: Extended through Jan. 13, 2027. Now requires a $15,000 deposit (was $10,000)
Update 7/1/26: Extended through September 27, 2026
Update 4/2/26: Extended until June 30, 2026 and now $300 instead of $200.
Extended until March 31, 2026. New promo code Q1SAV26
Offer at a glance
- Maximum bonus amount: $200
- Availability: Nationwide (excludes NY & FL and any other state without a branch unless you have an existing relationship)
- Direct deposit required: None
- Additional requirements: See below
- Hard/soft pull: Soft pull
- ChexSystems: Mixed data points
- Credit card funding: Can fund up to $3,000 with a credit card
- Monthly fees: $5, avoidable
- Early account termination fee: None
- Household limit: None
- Expiration date: January 14, 2026
The Offer
Direct link to offer
- U.S. Bank is offering a $300 bonus when you open a new business savings account and complete the following requirements:
- Use promo code Q4SAV26
- Deposit at least $15,000 in new money within 30 days.
- Maintain at least $15,000 balance for 60 days after account opening
The Fine Print
- Promo code Q4SAV25 MUST be used when opening a U.S. Bank Basic Business Savings account. Limit of one bonus per business. A $100 minimum deposit is required to open the referenced account.
- Earn your $200 Business Savings bonus by opening a new U.S. Bank Basic Business Savings account between 10/01/2025 and 1/14/2026. You must make deposit(s) of at least $10,000 in new money within 30 days of account opening and thereafter maintain a daily balance of at least $10,000 until the 60th day after account opening. The interest rates and APYs for the U.S. Bank Basic Business Savings account are variable, determined at the bank’s discretion, and can change at any time.
- New money is considered money that is new to U.S. Bank. Funds must come from outside U.S. Bank and cannot be transferred from another U.S. Bank product or a U.S. Bank Affiliate. For accounts opened on non-business days, weekends or federal holidays, the open date is considered the next business day. Account fees (e.g., monthly maintenance, paper statement fee, etc.) could reduce the qualifying daily balance, therefore you must make deposit(s) to cover the fees to maintain the daily balance during the qualifying period to be awarded the bonus. Refer to the Business Pricing Information Document for a list of fees.
- Bonus will be deposited into your new eligible U.S. Bank Basic Business Savings account within 30 days following the last calendar day of the month you complete all of the offer requirements, as long as the account is open and has a positive available balance.
- Offer may not be combined with any other business savings account bonus offer.
- All bank account bonuses are treated as income/interest and as such you have to pay taxes on them
Avoiding Fees
Monthly Fees
$5 monthly maintenance fee can be waived when you maintain a $500 daily balance
Early Account Termination Fee
I wasn’t able to find
Our Verdict
This account earns 0.05% APY. There is currently a $1,200 business checking bonus as well.
Hat tip to reader Bertha
Useful posts regarding bank bonuses:
What Can Save Mortgage Rates?
Mortgage rates feel pretty hopeless right now.
They’ve risen from sub-6% to the mid-7s in just the past six months.
With a meteoric rise over the past month, climbing nearly a full percentage point.
At this time last month, the 30-year fixed was around 6.75% and today it’s closer to 7.5%.
So what can save mortgage rates, if anything at all?
End the War, Bring Down Mortgage Rates
One of the biggest factors right now when it comes to mortgage rate movement is the conflict with Iran.
It has led to much higher energy prices, which translates to higher inflation.
That has forced the Fed to begin hiking again, with one hike already in the books and several more hikes potentially coming.
Prior to the conflict, the 30-year fixed was sub-6%, its best level since the summer of 2022.
As a quick reminder, mortgage rates were still in the low 3s in early 2022.
So the fact we were talking about the year 2022 was a huge victory for prospective home buyers and those looking to refinance.
But that all changed in a heartbeat when the war broke out, sending bond yields surging.
There was hope of a speedy resolution, but that has dimmed tremendously with the impasse in the Middle East now approaching month eight.
Long story short here, end the war and mortgage rates would benefit a ton. They likely wouldn’t come back down to sub-6% levels right away, but you could get them back into the 6s.
[Compare different mortgage rates side by side with my mortgage rate calculator.]
Weak Jobs Data Could Help Too
The next biggest driver is labor. Since the war is an inflation story, the other big piece is labor.
The Fed concerns itself with both, as does the bond market.
Lately, jobs data has been a little more positive than expected, which puts additional pressure on mortgage rates.
If we get a weaker-than-expected jobs report that points to economic cooling, you can get lower mortgage rates that way too.
It’s not the best path because you don’t want people losing their jobs (it’s counterintuitive).
But it is the other way the economy shows sign of slowing, which could give the Fed pause concerning additional rate hikes.
The Fed doesn’t set mortgage rates, but the bond market takes cues from Fed rate expectations.
And if they’re expected to keep hiking, the pressure builds on 30-year fixed mortgage rates too.
Granted a lot of that pressure already seems to be priced in, with rates up 75 basis points over the past month.
Taken together with the war-driven increase, we’re looking at rates about 150 bps higher than they were at the beginning of March.
Back then we had a 6% 30-year fixed (perhaps even 5.875%), and today homeowners are facing a 7.5% rate instead.
That’s pretty painful, especially since housing affordability was already out of reach for many even when rates were lower.
Midterm Magic for Mortgage Rates?
Perhaps President Trump and his pals will come up with some midterm magic to get mortgage rates down, knowing housing is always a hot button issue.
Trump campaigned on bringing back the low mortgage rates, but so far it hasn’t gone according to plan.
Not even close.
He’s aware of this and likely wants to fix it. Same with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.
But they’ve struggled to make any headway there. Knowing the midterms are right around the corner, they might be even more inclined to find a solution to the high-rate problem.
That could be more motivation to make a deal with Iran, which again is the main driver of mortgage rates lately.
So even if the President and company want lower rates, it’s ultimately the same solution to get them lower. End the war.
That eases pressure on inflation, which is arguably what caused mortgage rates to surge higher again this year.
Before creating this site, I worked as an account executive for a wholesale mortgage lender in Los Angeles. My hands-on experience in the early 2000s inspired me to begin writing about mortgages 20 years ago to help prospective (and existing) home buyers better navigate the home loan process. Follow me on X for hot takes.
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