This is part of NBC News’ Checkbook Chronicles, a series of profiles highlighting the financial realities of everyday Americans.

Stefanie Longenecker would love to take advantage of rising wages, a strong job market and the master’s degree she’s still paying off. But she has been sidelined from the workforce by a child care system that has grown inaccessible for many families.

Longenecker, 43, left her job as a hospital pathologist during the pandemic to care for her young children amid repeated day care and school closings. Last fall, while she was shopping around for child care for three of her four children in hope of returning to work, one provider quoted her $4,300 a month and couldn’t say when a spot would open up. Another center that would have cost $3,500 a month already had 70 infants on its waitlist.

“It would be great for my family if I could go back to work,” Longenecker said, but so far, “that’s just not in the cards.”

Primary source of income: $80,000 to $90,000 a year from her husband’s work as a mechanic, depending on overtime. The couple’s income has been more than halved since 2020, when Longenecker left her job, where she made more than $110,000 annually working with surgical specimens in a hospital lab.

Living situation: Longenecker and her husband own a home that they’re still paying the mortgage on in Palmyra, Pennsylvania, a small community outside Harrisburg, which they share with their children, ages 11 months, 2 years, 4 years and 10 years.

The couple would like to move into a bigger house. The value of their current one has swelled since the start of the pandemic, but that’s also true of those they’d consider moving into.

As with many households, the combination of high home prices and interest rates has left the family feeling locked in place. Meanwhile, upgrading their current home feels out of reach. Longenecker wants to install air conditioning and replace the windows but doesn’t expect to be able to afford that any time soon.

Economic outlook: “I definitely feel like the economy as a whole is for the better,” Longenecker said, adding that she’s hopeful even though her family’s finances remain tight. “It does seem like things are improving.”

If she could just secure affordable child care, she said, she’s confident she would find a job “in a heartbeat” given the strong labor market, adding that demand for her husband’s skills is strong. Pennsylvania’s unemployment rate has held steady at 3.4% all year, lower than the current national 4% level.

Budget pain points: While Longenecker’s husband’s pay has increased over the past few years, so have the family’s health care and other costs.

“In our experience, when he makes more money, things cost more. Gas is more expensive; groceries are so much more expensive,” she said. “It seems like on paper we’re going to get ahead, and then the car doesn’t pass inspection or gas goes up again.” (Prices at the pump in Longenecker’s Lebanon County are just a few cents lower than the statewide average a year ago; nationwide, groceries were more than 2% higher in May than the year before.)

The family has pulled back on short- and long-term spending alike. Vacations are on hold for now. Her husband traded in his vehicle for a heavily used truck costing just $1,000, and he sold a cherished Harley-Davidson motorcycle that had belonged to his father.

In the short term, Longenecker said, her biggest financial worry is what would happen if her husband were to lose his job. They have only a small emergency fund and would most likely need help from relatives to pay their bills if that happened. Longer-term, she worries about the implications of not being able to contribute to her retirement savings.

Life as a full-time caregiver: Longenecker hadn’t planned to leave her job, but running out of paid time off to navigate Covid-related day care closures helped force her hand. “It was a huge decision,” she said. “We had to revamp our whole financial picture for right now and for the future to make that happen,” she said.

Despite the financial and professional sacrifices, she’s grateful for the time she gets to spend with her children. “We haven’t lost our house. We’re not in debt,” she said. “I’m incredibly lucky to be able to spend this time with my kids, even recognizing the shortcomings.”

The child care crunch has put a growing squeeze on families since the pandemic, when more than 100,000 workers left the industry and more than 16,000 child care centers permanently closed.

Since then, child care costs have risen more than 30%, and households with child care expenses have been spending at a slower pace and dipping into savings at a faster rate than the general population, according to a Bank of America analysis of its customers’ spending.

The strain has disproportionately affected women, with a Stanford University survey finding in 2022 that 39% of women caregivers had left the workforce or reduced their work hours since the pandemic began.

Looking ahead to returning to work: While Longenecker remains eager to pick back up with her professional career, she wonders whether it will be harder the longer she has to wait.

“It’s a hugely hands-on job,” she said of her pathology work. “I can read all the research and understand the technical things, but not having my hands in it, doing it every day, it is definitely a concern that I have.

“It is a ‘use it or lose it’ skill, and every day I’m losing.”

Americans will be splashing around this summer in the backyard pools they’ve already got, but not splashing out as much on new ones. 

Swimming pool installations were part of the home improvement frenzy that swept the country during the pandemic as Americans were stuck at home. But recent signs show demand is slowing as households with spending money shift it more toward vacations than renovations.

Pool Corp., a national pool equipment distributor with a roughly $11 billion market valuation, said last week it expects new pool construction to fall by 15% to 20% this year. Some local contractors across the country are seeing a pullback, too.

Skip Ast III, sales director at Shasta Pools in the Phoenix metropolitan area, said the local industry has been having a harder time since roughly 2022.

“If 2023 wasn’t already considered — by pool volume — kind of disastrous, this year’s been worse,” he said, but added that the company has managed to adapt.

While consumers aren’t cutting back on overall record spending, those with extra money in their budgets are increasingly burning it on experiences like travel, dining out and other service-sector purchases.

Airlines and hotels are expecting a strong travel season, cruise lines are seeing record bookings, and tickets for concerts and sporting events are still hot at sky-high prices. By contrast, nonessential household purchases are cooling off amid higher food costs and the Federal Reserve’s push to tame inflation by keeping interest rates elevated — triggering a long stretch of steep mortgage and credit card rates.

The falloff in big-ticket home purchases has been many months in the making, and pools aren’t the only backyard feature facing slower demand; Traeger Grills reported declining revenues in the first quarter, part of a trend that began early in the post-pandemic recovery. But businesses that rely on Americans’ appetite for home upgrades are still adjusting to leaner times — including pool builders.

In 2020, installations of all kinds of pools, from in-ground and hot tub pools to typically cheaper inflatable and above-ground models, rose by 20%, according to property analytics firm Cape Analytics.

At the time, “people started settling in for, ‘OK, we’re going to be at home for a while, we need to bring the vacations into our backyards,’” said Ast, whose family has been in the pool construction business for nearly 60 years. He recalled suppliers struggling to keep up with a crush of orders and contractors facing monthslong backlogs.

Scott Payne, a pool installer in Hatfield, Pennsylvania, also saw business explode during the pandemic: “As a company, we doubled revenue five of the first seven years. Two of those years were during Covid.” He described taking eight to 10 calls a day at the peak of demand.

But despite the more recent declines nationwide, Payne and Ast said their businesses are doing well, even as both have raised prices due to rising materials costs. Both said their work during the pandemic helped lay a foundation to weather this slowdown.

Responding to surging demand in an affluent area several years ago allowed Payne’s company to develop an “omnipresence” there that it’s still cashing in on, he said. While he has fewer projects in the works today, he’s doing more expensive ones, allowing his business to maintain its higher revenues.

“A lot of companies have maybe pulled back a little,” he said. “I can’t say we’re not seeing it, but we’re maybe a little isolated from it. We’re very, very busy still.”

Ast said Shasta’s own moves during the pandemic are also paying off as demand cools. It rolled out an online calculator to help potential clients estimate the costs of their projects, and it launched a new pool care division that offers maintenance services after installation. All these factors combined have allowed the company to take in a greater share of revenue from fewer consumers in the overall market, Ast said.

Even Pool Corp. pointed to a silver lining in the slowdown: After so many households recently built new pools or upgraded existing ones, there’s higher demand for upkeep services like the kind Shasta now offers.

“We are encouraged as maintenance-related product sales have remained stable, evidenced by volume growth in chemicals, and equipment sales (excluding cleaners) being down only 2% for the year, an improvement from the 3% decline realized in the first quarter of 2024,” the company said in its earnings release.

And with climate change contributing to earlier, hotter, more frequent heat waves — like those that scorched much of the country in mid-June — some consumers may be starting to see swimming pools as more of a must-have.

In Arizona, Ast said, “the lines get blurred a little bit between luxury and need in the middle of the desert.”

Record summer air travel demand isn’t translating to record U.S. airline profits. Carriers will have to answer for that disconnect when they report quarterly results this month.

Some airlines have forecast record demand, and in some cases, revenue. On Sunday, the Transportation Security Administration screened more than 3 million people, a one-day record.

But higher labor and other costs have eaten into airlines’ bottom lines. To adapt to slower demand growth and other challenges, some carriers have slowed if not halted hiring compared with hiring sprees when they rebuilt after the pandemic.

And some airlines are facing delays of new, more fuel-efficient aircraft from Airbus and Boeing at the same time that a Pratt & Whitney engine recall has grounded dozens of jets.

Yet U.S. airlines have increased capacity, flying about 6% more seats in July than they did in July 2023, according to aviation data firm OAG. The expansion is keeping airfare in check, and stocks in the sector have fallen behind the broader market.

The NYSE Arca Airline Index, which tracks 16 mostly U.S. airlines, is down almost 19% this year, while the S&P 500 has advanced more than 16%.

What the third quarter will look like for airlines is “clear as mud,” Raymond James analyst Savanthi Syth said in a note Friday, citing headwinds such as potentially weaker spending from coach-class clientele, the Paris Olympics’ impact on some Europe bookings, and possible changes in corporate travel demand.

Also, some travelers have been opting for trips in late spring and early summer, raising questions about late-summer demand.

Investors will get more insight into the traditionally slower tail end of summer and the rest of the year when airlines report quarterly results, starting with Delta Air Lines on Thursday.

Analysts consider Delta the best of the bunch, thanks in large part to the airline’s success in marketing more expensive, premium seats and its lucrative deal with American Express.

In April, Delta, the most profitable U.S. airline, forecast quarterly adjusted earnings of $2.20 to $2.50 a share for the second quarter, which would be down from the adjusted $2.68 a share it brought in a year earlier.

Delta, its rival United Airlines, which reports the following week, and Alaska Airlines are top picks for Wolfe Research airline analyst Scott Group, who said in a June 28 research note that the three have less earnings risk and better free cash flow than other carriers.

Shares of Delta and United are each up about 14% this year through July 5, the standouts in a sector that is mostly down this year. Alaska shares are down about 2%.

Airports are bustling this summer. Nearly 3 million people, setting a record, passed through U.S. airport checkpoints on June 23 alone, according to theTransportation Security Administration.

Airlines have been expanding their schedules, both domestically and internationally, pushing down fares. U.S.-Europe capacity for July is up nearly 8% from a year ago, according to consulting firm Airline/Aircraft Projects, with new routes largely targeting leisure travelers.

Fare-tracking company Hopper reported in June that summer flights between the U.S. and Europe in coach were going for $892 on average, compared with $1,065 for summer 2023.

Airfare was down nearly 6% in May from a year earlier, according to the latest U.S. inflation data.

Despite higher numbers of passengers, some carriers have admitted weaker sales than expected because of the increased flights. American Airlines on May 28 cut its second-quarter revenue and profit forecasts and announced its chief commercial officer was leaving after a sales strategy backfired.

“The domestic supply and demand imbalance has led to a weaker domestic pricing environment than we had forecast,” American Airlines CEO Robert Isom said at a Bernstein industry conference the next day. “There’s more discounting activity than we saw a year ago. Now, industry capacity is expected to come down in the second half of the year, and that should help.”

Southwest Airlines cut its second-quarter forecast in late June, citing shifting demand patterns. The Dallas-based airline is under pressure to quickly change its long-profitable business model — which has no seat assignments and one class of service — as big rivals such as United and Delta tout strong growth from premium cabins.

The airline is trying to fend off activist investor Elliott Investment Management, which disclosed a nearly $2 billion stake in the carrier in June and called for a leadership change.

“We will adapt as our customers’ needs adapt,” Southwest CEO Bob Jordan said at an industry event hosted by Politico on June 12, discussing potential new revenue initiatives.

Both American and Southwest report second-quarter results toward the end of July.

Some money-losing carriers, such as JetBlue Airways and Frontier Airlines, are already making changes.

JetBlue has been cutting unprofitable flights this year and making sure that planes outfitted with its high-end Mint business cabin, where tickets can go for more than four times a coach fare, is on the right routes.

Meanwhile Frontier Airlines and fellow discounter Spirit Airlines have done away with change fees for standard coach tickets and above, following larger, legacy carriers’ move during the pandemic. Both budget airlines announced in May that they will start offering bundled fares to include seat assignments and other add-ons that they used to charge for.

Spirit, which is struggling with the fallout from a judge’s ruling that blocked JetBlue from buying the airline, and is the most affected by the Pratt engine grounding, last week warned some 200 pilots they could be furloughed this year, according to the pilots union.

At Spirit’s annual shareholder meeting in June, CEO Ted Christie brushed off suggestions that Spirit is considering filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, with a more than $1 billion debt payment due in September 2025.

Target will soon stop accepting personal checks as a form of payment at checkout.

In a statement to NBC News, the retail giant said it was committed to creating an easy and convenient checkout experience — but that due to ‘extremely low volumes,’ it would no longer take personal checks starting July 15.

It said it has taken several measures to notify guests in advance of the move. It will still accept cash, digital wallet payments like Apple Pay, SNAP/EBT, buy now, pay later services, and credit and debit cards. 

Rival Walmart will still accept personal checks.

Target has announced several new store policies aimed at streamlining the checkout process, some of which were also aimed at curbing theft. In March, the company said it would be taking steps to limit or eliminate self-checkout options at some stores this year. Last month, Bloomberg News reported Target was allowing employees to stop thefts of $50 or more — lower than the previous $100 threshold.