Happy Tuesday! Labor Day came and went, the white shoes are back in the closet, and summer is now officially someone else's problem.

This week’s lineup:

Pet insurance premiums have climbed right alongside vet bills, and somewhere in there, people started asking a reasonable question: can I at least deduct this? The IRS has an answer, and it depends entirely on whether your pet has a job or just a vibe.

Service animal costs go on Schedule A as medical expenses, and only the portion above 7.5% of your AGI counts. That also means itemizing instead of taking the standard deduction ($16,100 single, $32,200 married filing jointly for 2026), so do the math before you start hoarding vet receipts.

If your pet clocks in for work, there might be a real deduction here. If their job is emotional support via chaos and shedding, that one's still on you.

Answer three quick questions about what your pet actually does, and find out whether you're sitting on a real medical, business, or charitable deduction — or just a very expensive best friend.

Most people pick their group life insurance number during open enrollment while half-asleep, then never think about it again until a line on their W-2 makes them squint.

Section 79 of the tax code excludes the first $50,000 of employer-paid group life coverage from your income. Coverage above that gets taxed using an IRS age-based rate table and shows up as imputed income. A 50-year-old with $175,000 in employer coverage, for instance, would have $125,000 in "excess" coverage generating a few hundred dollars a year in taxable income they will never actually collect on unless things go very badly.

Group coverage is tied to your job, like a gym membership you only value once you can't use it. Leave, get laid off, or retire, and that coverage usually disappears with you, sometimes with the option to convert to an individual policy at a rate that will make you sit down. An individually owned policy stays yours no matter what your employer decides to do with itself.

Free coverage through work is a nice perk. It is not, however, a plan.

Punch in your age and coverage amount to see your exact imputed income number — the line on your W-2 you've probably never noticed, for a payout you'll never personally collect.

Homeowner tax questions get muddled fast, and this year they're extra muddled because one major rule actually moved.

Your homeowners insurance premium on a personal residence isn't deductible, and it never has been, OBBBA or no OBBBA. If you rent out part of your home or run a business out of it, that portion of the premium can count as a business expense. Your regular policy on the house you actually live in stays firmly off your return, same as it's always been.

Private mortgage insurance (PMI) deductibility expired after 2021 and has been dead since, quietly missed by absolutely no one except the four million people who used to claim it. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act revived it permanently, effective for tax years beginning after Dec. 31, 2025, meaning it first shows up on your 2026 return, filed in 2027. PMI now gets treated as mortgage interest, subject to the same $750,000 loan cap, and you still have to itemize.

So if you've got PMI and wrote it off mentally years ago, uncross it off the list.

PMI is deductible again, but it phases out fast. Enter your income and mortgage details to see your real number before you assume it applies to you.

Every so often, someone decides to stop asking the tax code for an exception and just argue the rule itself shouldn't exist. That's the swing an East Coast attorney took this year, and she picked a genuinely sympathetic plaintiff to make the case: her golden retriever.

In June 2025, attorney Amanda Reynolds sued the IRS in federal court, arguing that her golden retriever, Finnegan, should qualify as a dependent under the tax code and that denying her the deduction violates her constitutional rights.

Reynolds filed suit in the Eastern District of New York against the IRS directly, asking the court to recognize Finnegan Mary Reynolds as a dependent under Section 152 of the tax code. Her argument: dependents are people you feed, shelter, and pay medical bills for, who can't support themselves financially. Finnegan checks every one of those boxes. He just also happens to be a dog.

Reynolds argues that excluding pets from dependent status violates her Fifth and 14th Amendment rights, framing the tax code's human-only definition of a dependent as a form of unequal treatment.

The presiding judge, Magistrate Judge James Wicks, has made his doubts fairly public. He granted a stay on discovery, questioned whether Reynolds properly served the IRS in the first place, and signaled real doubt that her equal protection and just compensation claims have the legal teeth to survive a motion to dismiss.

In plain terms: before the court even gets to the fun question of "can a golden retriever be a dependent?” it has to get through the much less fun question of "did you file this correctly?"

Until a court says otherwise, the law hasn't budged an inch: dependents have to be human, a loving pet isn't a deductible one no matter how you insure him, and the IRS is under no obligation to see Finnegan the way his owner does.

The quick (and slightly prickly) stories we didn’t have time to get to: