Things To Do In SW Florida

Most of the Seminole Towne Center — a once-bustling upscale mall in Sanford, now mostly quiet and vacant — remained closed for the second day in a row on Friday after the property owners failed to pay the electricity bill.

A Florida Power & Light spokesperson said in an email to the Sentinel that shutting down the power was not an easy decision.

“Disconnection for non-payment is and always has been a last resort,” said Chris Curtland. “While FPL doesn’t take lightly the decision to turn off anyone’s power, we must treat all customers fairly given unpaid electric bills are ultimately paid for by all our customers in the form of higher rates.”

Even so, the big-box anchor stores at the mall — including Dick’s Sporting Goods, JCPenney, Dillards and Elev8 Fun — remained open and with the lights on. Those businesses are on separate power connections.

Mehran Kohansieh, of Great Neck, N.Y., a representative of the Towne Center’s owner, Seminole Mall Realty Holdings, said Friday he was surprised that the mall had not yet re-opened. read more

Stephanie Zito | Bankrate.com (TNS)

Although many analysts predicted that post-COVID “revenge travel” would peak in 2022, ongoing research suggests consumers are still prioritizing spending money on travel. According to a 2023 Bankrate survey, planned leisure travel was up from 2022 — even as many Americans still had less than three months of emergency savings in the bank.

This demand has led to record-breaking revenue for the U.S. car rental industry, according to Auto Rental News data. Although rental car companies were hit hard in 2020, total revenue soared to $36.1 billion in 2022 and $38.3 billion in 2023. But while this is great news for the rental car industry, it often means higher car rental prices and lower availability for travelers.

Usually, I almost never recommend using rewards for rental car bookings since you can almost always find a rental car deal through AutoSlash, Hotwire, Kayak or Priceline if you don’t care what company you’re renting from. When these kinds of deals don’t exist, however, here’s what you need to know about booking a car rental with miles or points. read more

By Eliza Haverstock | NerdWallet

On Wednesday, 153,000 student loan borrowers got the surprise so many others have been waiting for: total loan forgiveness. The White House said it approved $1.2 billion of student loan forgiveness for borrowers with low balances who enrolled in the newest income-driven repayment (IDR) plan, Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE).

Impacted borrowers got an email addressed from President Joe Biden that read, “Congratulations — all or a portion of your federal student loans will be forgiven because you qualify for early loan forgiveness under my Administration’s SAVE Plan.”

To qualify for this wave of relief, you must have:

• Enrolled in the SAVE plan.
• Borrowed $12,000 or less in federal student loans.
• Spent at least 10 years in repayment, including the pandemic pause and other time counted under the one-time IDR account adjustment.

Next week, the White House will send out another round of forgiveness emails. Borrowers who sign up for SAVE now could be eligible for the upcoming forgiveness.

“This is something that will continue on moving forward, so it’s not a one-time thing,” says Sabrina Calazans, managing director at the Student Debt Crisis Center, a nonprofit group that aims to advance student debt relief. “It is something that is now basically part of the student loan system, and so folks will be able to continuously benefit from this.” read more

AT&T said Thursday that it had fully restored service to its wireless network after a widespread outage temporarily cut off connections for users across the United States for many hours, the cause of which was still under investigation.

The outage, which affected people in cities including Atlanta, Los Angeles and New York, was first reported around 3:30 a.m. Eastern time, according to Downdetector.com, which tracks user reports of telecommunication and internet disruptions. At its peak, the site listed around 70,000 reports of disrupted service for the wireless carrier.

Multiple government agencies said they were looking into the incident, although the Biden administration told reporters that AT&T said there was no reason to think it was a cyberattack.

AT&T did not disclose the scope of the outage, nor the reason for it. When the outage first began Thursday morning, the company listed the cause as “maintenance activity.”

Jim Greer, an AT&T spokesperson, apologized in a statement confirming service was restored and said the company was “taking steps to ensure our customers do not experience this again in the future.” read more

By CHRISTOPHER RUGABER (AP Economics Writer)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Several Federal Reserve policymakers warned Thursday against cutting U.S. interest rates too soon or by too much in the wake of recent data showing inflation stayed unexpectedly high in January.

Their comments echoed the minutes from the Fed’s last meeting in January, released Wednesday. The minutes showed that most central bank officials were concerned about the risk that moving too fast to cut rates could allow inflation to rise again after it has declined significantly in the past year. Only “a couple” of policymakers worried about a different risk: that keeping rates too high for too long could slow the economy and potentially trigger a recession.

Christopher Waller, a member of the Fed’s influential board of governors, titled a written copy of remarks he delivered Thursday, “What’s the rush?”

“We need to verify that the progress on inflation we saw in the last half of 2023 will continue and this means there is no rush to begin cutting interest rates,” Waller said. read more