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Borrowers are cutting back but still struggling to escape debt, Freedom Debt Relief and Money.com study finds

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Nearly half can make only minimum payments or are behind, while 79% would accept a credit-score decline to become debt free faster

SAN MATEO, Calif., Oct. 1, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Americans carrying substantial unsecured debt are cutting everyday expenses, drawing from retirement savings and trying multiple repayment strategies, yet many still cannot make meaningful progress, according to a new study from Freedom Debt Relief and Money.com.

The study, “Deep in debt, borrowers are cutting back but still struggling,” is available on FreedomDebtRelief.com and as a PDF download.

Freedom Debt Relief, one of the largest and longest-running providers of debt settlement services in the U.S., together with Money.com surveyed 1,800 adults with at least $10,000 in unsecured debt, excluding student loans. The study found that 28% can afford to make only the minimum-required payments, while 21% are behind on at least one account.

The findings challenge the assumption that people remain in debt because they are unwilling to change their habits. Borrowers reported cutting dining, shopping and travel while pursuing a range of repayment strategies. Nearly one-third have withdrawn from retirement savings to pay down debt in the past 12 months, while 24% have borrowed against home equity to consolidate debt.

“There’s a tendency to assume that people get into, and stay in, debt because they aren’t willing to change their habits,” said Freedom Debt Relief President Sean Fox. “This research paints a much more complicated picture. Many people are already making difficult tradeoffs and actively looking for a way to improve their financial situation. Yet they’re still struggling because they don’t know where to start or which strategies are best for their specific situation.”

Borrowers make sacrifices, but still need a path forward

The study found that borrowers are highly motivated to reduce debt. Their goals extend beyond paying down balances or lowering interest: They want to regain control, reduce stress and create greater financial stability.

Key findings include:

Many borrowers are struggling to get ahead: 28% can make only the minimum-required payments, while 21% are behind on at least one account.Debt reduction is both a financial and emotional priority: 48% want to regain control and feel financially stable, while 48% want to reduce money-related stress and anxiety.Cutbacks are part of borrowers’ daily routines: 41% have stopped dining out or ordering delivery and 40% have stopped nonessential online shopping.Borrowers want immediate breathing room: 60% prioritize reducing stress, 57% reducing monthly payments and 56% improving cash flow.Speed can outweigh protecting credit: 79% would accept a credit-score decline to become debt-free faster, including 37% who would accept a drop of 100 points or more.Extra cash would go toward financial security: About 41% would prioritize faster debt repayment, while only 5% would prioritize discretionary spending.

Borrowers also see negotiation as a viable path but may struggle to follow through. While 69% consider negotiating directly with a credit card issuer safe, 14% started contacting creditors directly but did not complete the process. Only about half feel somewhat or very confident speaking with creditors.

That gap highlights how professional debt settlement may provide structure and experienced support for eligible consumers who do not feel equipped to navigate creditor negotiations on their own. Overall, 52% consider debt settlement safe, with past-due borrowers more likely to view it as a safe option.

Freedom Debt Relief launches consumer research initiative

The report is the first study from Freedom Debt Relief Insights, a new research initiative that will draw on original surveys, proprietary data and more than 20 years of experience helping consumers in financial hardship. The initiative will publish research and commentary on the experiences, behaviors and financial challenges of consumers carrying significant unsecured debt.

Freedom Debt Relief Insights aims to provide consumers with clear, practical information while contributing to a deeper understanding of financial hardship among financial services professionals, consumer advocates, researchers, policymakers and other stakeholders.

The full study is available online and as a PDF download.

About Money.com 

Money has a 50-plus-year legacy of guiding people to financial victories with up-to-date information, education, and tools. Money, a digital destination, helps create richer lives for everyone—in every sense of the word. Signature franchises include a bevy of Best-In categories such as Best Places to Live,Best Crypto Exchanges, Best Mortgage Lenders, Best Life Insurance,Best Auto Insurance, Best VA Loans, Best Homeowner Insurance, Best High-Yield Savings Accounts, Best Credit Cards, Best Colleges, Best Student Loans, and Best Student Loan Refinance Companies, with an aim to improve your finances and promote your well-being. For more information, visit Money.com.

About Freedom Debt Relief

Freedom Debt Relief is one of the largest and longest-running providers of debt settlement services in the United States. We help consumers take control of their finances by giving them a proven plan to relieve their debt burden — and in the process, help them make better financial decisions in the future. Working on behalf of its consumer clients, Freedom Debt Relief negotiates with creditors to reduce the amount of debt they owe. Freedom Debt Relief is an accredited debt settlement company based in San Mateo, Calif., and has served more than 2 million consumers, helping to resolve over $22 billion in debt since 2002.

Press Contact

pressinquiry@freedomdebtrelief.com

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SOURCE Freedom Debt Relief

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RTX’s Raytheon awarded $24.4 billion multi-year contract for SM-6 interceptors

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Contract boosts production of combat‑proven missile defense capability

ARLINGTON, Va., Oct. 1, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Raytheon, an RTX (NYSE: RTX) business, has secured a five-year contract, with two additional option years, valued up to $24.4 billion for Standard Missile-6 (SM-6) interceptors, significantly increasing the availability of a critical munition able to conduct both offensive strikes and missile defense missions.

Building on landmark agreements between Raytheon and the Department of War, this long-term order ensures a consistent, reliable supply of SM-6s for the U.S. Navy.

“SM-6’s multi-mission capability is vital to our customer, and Raytheon is intensely focused on meeting the demand,” said Raytheon President Phil Jasper. “By continuously investing in our operations and facilities, we are removing constraints and boosting capacity to ensure we deliver this critical capability our sailors depend on.”

Raytheon has invested heavily to keep pace with rising demand, growing its skilled workforce, building stronger partnerships across the defense industrial base and automating production. These combined efforts are intended to support significantly higher output for near and long-term needs.

SM-6 is the only combat-proven weapon that can perform anti-air warfare, anti-surface warfare and ballistic missile defense. It has been successfully fired from various U.S. Navy ship-based platforms and launchers on land, providing the fleet with a versatile and highly reliable weapon to counter the full range of kinetic threats faced by today’s naval forces.

About Raytheon
Raytheon, an RTX business, is a leading provider of defense solutions to help the U.S. government, our allies and partners defend their national sovereignty and ensure their security. For more than 100 years, Raytheon has developed new technologies and enhanced existing capabilities in integrated air and missile defense, smart weapons, missiles, advanced sensors and radars, interceptors, space-based systems, hypersonics and missile defense across land, air, sea and space.

About RTX
With more than 180,000 global employees, we push the limits of technology and science to redefine how we connect and protect our world. With industry-leading capabilities, we advance aviation, engineer integrated defense systems for operational success, and develop next-generation technology solutions and manufacturing to help global customers address their most critical challenges. The company, with 2025 sales of more than $88 billion, is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia.

For questions or to schedule an interview, please contact corporatepr@rtx.com.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/rtxs-raytheon-awarded-24-4-billion-multi-year-contract-for-sm-6-interceptors-302896562.html

SOURCE RTX

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Fastino Labs Releases GLiDE, the First Thinking Decision Model, Leading the Decision Index’s Top Model by 6.9 Points

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SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 1, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Fastino Labs, the applied AI research lab behind the widely adopted open source GLiNER model family, today released GLiDE (Generalized Lightweight Decision Engine), the first decision model with adaptive reasoning. In Fastino Research team’s runs of the official Decision Index 0.2.1 scorer, GLiDE scores 64.81, leading Jev’s published 57.91 by 6.90 skill points. GLiDE outperforms Jev across all five evaluation areas and on 31 of 38 benchmarks. GLiDE is available today via the Fastino API.

As AI agents take on real work, the hardest part is often not generating text but deciding what to do next: which tool to call, whether to ask for approval, or when to stop. Most systems handle these choices by prompting a large general-purpose model and parsing its output, which is slow, expensive, and hard to trust in production. Existing decision models are faster, but they score every option in a single fixed pass, which breaks down when the right answer depends on arithmetic, code, dates, or several related facts. GLiDE is built to handle both.

Structured Decisions:

GLiDE takes an application’s current state and a defined set of options, then returns one selected action, a confidence score, and a probability for every option. Because the output is structured, developers can act on it immediately, set confidence thresholds, or route uncertain cases to a human, without parsing or validating free-form text.

Adaptive Thinking:

Every decision starts with a fast first pass. When GLiDE is confident, it answers right away. When it isn’t, it thinks further and folds that reasoning into its final probabilities. In testing, roughly two-thirds of requests were resolved on the fast path, with reasoning reserved for the remaining third. Easy decisions stay fast, and hard ones get the compute they need.

Built for Hard Decisions:

GLiDE’s biggest gains over Jev come on reasoning-intensive tasks and tool use. It leads by 11.5 skill points in Knowledge and Reasoning (62.9 vs 51.4) and 8.4 points in Tools and Automation (83.5 vs 75.1). On CRUXEval, which tests code reasoning, GLiDE scores 92.6% accuracy versus Jev’s 73.0%, and on CLadder, which tests causal reasoning, it scores 88.7% versus 72.6%. Its 40,000 token context window fits full policies, contracts, runbooks, and support histories.

“We think decision-making will become its own layer of the AI stack, much as retrieval has. You shouldn’t need to call a frontier model every time an agent needs to choose its next step. GLiNER has passed 50 million downloads, and GLiDE is our best decision model yet. It handles routine choices quickly and can think through the harder ones.” said George Hurn-Maloney, CEO and co-founder of Fastino Labs.

Use Cases:

GLiDE handles the everyday classification and routing tasks served by existing decision models while extending to decisions that require deeper reasoning. Any application that combines context with a defined set of choices can use the same interface. Straightforward decisions remain fast, while uncertain decisions automatically receive additional reasoning.

Navigating large agent action graphs. Select the next action from hundreds of tools and possible paths while accounting for prerequisites, previous results, permissions, failure states, and downstream consequences.Controlling high-risk agent actions. Evaluate a proposed database, infrastructure, or financial operation against the agent’s permissions, organizational policies, system state, and potential impact before deciding whether to execute, sandbox, request approval, or block it.Diagnosing production incidents. Combine alerts, logs, recent deployments, dependency health, and runbook instructions to choose among monitoring, restarting, rolling back, isolating, or escalating.Applying complex contracts and policies. Trace cross-references, exceptions, dates, thresholds, and conflicting clauses to determine whether a claim should be approved, rejected, revised, or escalated.Verifying reasoning-intensive model output. Check answers that depend on arithmetic, temporal reasoning, code execution paths, causal relationships, or multiple supporting facts, then decide whether to accept, reject, or request revision.Resolving constrained operational decisions. Choose among predefined plans using scheduling requirements, eligibility rules, resource limits, configuration dependencies, and competing priorities.

Availability:

GLiDE is available now through the Fastino API under the model ID fastino/GLiDE. Get started and see pricing at docs.fastino.ai.

About Fastino Labs

Fastino Labs is an applied AI research lab building small open weight models and the infrastructure to make them continuously better in production. Founded in 2024 and based in San Francisco, California, Fastino is the creator of the GLiNER open source model family and the first agentic fine-tuning and adaptive inference platform. The company is backed by Khosla Ventures, Insight Partners, M12, NEA, and others. Learn more at fastino.ai.

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SOURCE Fastino Labs

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ARM & HAMMER™ BAKING SODA AND LEGOLAND® RESORTS BUILD THE FUN WITH LIMITED-EDITION PACK AND CHANCE TO WIN A FAMILY GETAWAY

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Starting October 1, purchase three qualifying ARM & HAMMER™ Baking Soda products for a chance to win a Grand Prize family getaway to a LEGOLAND® Resort, plus receive a Buy One, Get One Free LEGOLAND® ticket offer.

NEW YORK, Oct. 1, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — A box of ARM & HAMMER™ Baking Soda can do so many things, from cleaning and deodorizing to baking and hands-on STEAM experiments. And this fall, it could even unlock a whole new kind of fun. ARM & HAMMER Baking Soda is teaming up with LEGOLAND® Resorts for a new limited-time promotion that brings together two brands that know a thing or two about inspiring creativity, curiosity and hands-on fun.

Known for its 100+ uses, ARM & HAMMER Baking Soda has been a household staple for generations, giving families countless ways to make more out of one simple orange box. Now, together with LEGOLAND Resorts, the brand is extending that spirit of possibility beyond the home, giving families a new way to play, explore and create together.

“ARM & HAMMER Baking Soda has always been about encouraging families to think beyond the box, whether they’re tackling everyday household tasks, experimenting with STEAM or finding new ways to get creative together,” said Aaron Greengard, Associate Marketing Director at ARM & HAMMER Baking Soda. “By teaming up with LEGOLAND Resorts, we’re bringing that same sense of creativity and fun to life in a new way, giving families the chance to turn an everyday purchase into an unforgettable experience.”

Beginning October 1, consumers will find limited-edition LEGOLAND themed artwork on ARM & HAMMER™ Baking Soda’s iconic orange box, along with a special ticket offer and the chance to win a grand prize LEGOLAND getaway.

“LEGOLAND is all about giving families the opportunity to build, play and explore together, so we’re thrilled to partner with ARM & HAMMER Baking Soda to bring that spirit of creativity into everyday life,” said Justin Carter, SVP Managing Director, North America at Merlin Entertainments. “Together, we’re connecting the imaginative world of LEGOLAND with a product families already know and use, creating even more ways to inspire play, discovery and memorable experiences together.”

A Chance to Win a LEGOLAND Adventure

Starting October 1 through December 31, consumers can purchase three qualifying ARM & HAMMER Baking Soda products and submit their receipt at AHxLEGOLAND.com or scan the QR code on limited-edition pack. Participants will receive a Buy One, Get One Free LEGOLAND ticket offer, redeemable at LEGOLAND Resorts in California, Florida and New York.*

Participants will also be entered for the chance to win a grand-prize getaway to the LEGOLAND Resort of their choice in the U.S., including round-trip airfare for four, two nights of hotel accommodations and four LEGOLAND tickets.

For more information about the ARM & HAMMER Baking Soda and LEGOLAND Resorts promotion, including full offer details and official rules, visit AHxLEGOLAND.com.

* NO PURCHASE NECESSARY TO ENTER OR WIN. A purchase will not increase your chances of winning. Sweepstakes begins at 12:00 a.m. ET on 10/1/2026 and ends at 11:59 p.m. ET on 12/31/2026. Open only to legal residents of the 50 US/DC, 18+ years of age. For Official Rules, including how to enter, odds, prize details and restrictions, visit AHxLEGOLAND.com. Void where prohibited. Message and data rates may apply. Sponsor: Church & Dwight Co., Inc., Princeton South Corporate Center, 500 Charles Ewing Blvd. Ewing, NJ 08628. 

About ARM & HAMMER™
For more than 180 years, ARM & HAMMER™ continues to provide trusted and hardworking products consumers love. ARM & HAMMER™ has all your needs covered from cleaning and laundry to personal and oral care to pets. For more information, please visit https://www.armandhammer.com.

About Church & Dwight Co., Inc.
With a rich heritage of commitment to people and the planet for over 180 years, Church & Dwight is committed to conducting our operations in a sustainable and environmentally responsible manner using recycled materials in our cartons. We are continually assessing the impacts of our operations on the environment while developing, manufacturing, and marketing a broad range of consumer household, personal care and specialty products with sustainability efforts incorporated into our new product innovation including Arm & Hammer™, TheraBreath™, OxiClean™, Waterpik™, Orajel™, Hero™, Viviscal™, Zicam™, and Batiste™.

About LEGOLAND Resorts
LEGOLAND® Resorts bring the LEGO® brand to life on an epic scale. Merlin Entertainments – which holds the exclusive rights to the LEGOLAND brand – currently operates 11 parks globally with locations spanning North America, Europe, and Asia – including properties in California, Florida, New York, Denmark, the United Kingdom, Germany, Dubai, Japan, Malaysia and China. It is realizing the growth potential of these theme parks by expanding them into ‘mega-resort’ short break destinations, offering guests themed accommodation, second gate attractions (including waterparks) and LEGO themed experiences that are rich in interactive features. Designed to provide creative, interactive, and educational experiences for families with children ages 2 to 12, LEGOLAND Resorts invite guests to step inside the colorful world of LEGO where imagination comes to life. See www.LEGOLAND.com for more information.

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SOURCE Arm & Hammer Baking Soda (Church & Dwight Inc).

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