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

On a hot Georgia afternoon this spring, Nancy Breland was in her yard clearing branches and debris, trying to ward off any potential damage to her home from a large storm heading toward her coastal town.

At 72, Breland has been doing much of the upkeep around her home after her husband fell ill several years ago. She’d like to hire some help but worries about the impact on her budget. 

Breland feels she should be able to retire comfortably after her husband spent his career working as a union pipe fitter and she worked for decades as a hospital medical technologist. Instead, she said, she feels under increasing financial pressure and has been looking to cut her monthly expenses in the face of rising prices for groceries, utilities, insurance and home maintenance. 

“All the money I will ever have come in is what I have now,” she said. “I am worried that as we get older, I will have to employ outside landscapers and house cleaning services when we can no longer do it ourselves. This will be an added cost on top of decreasing funds due to inflation. I know many of my friends are already struggling with this. Fixed income is very hard when inflation is so high.”

Primary source of income: Combined, Breland and her husband have around $7,600 in monthly income from their retirement accounts and pension and Social Security payments.

That is enough money to cover their monthly bills, though Breland has been cutting costs over the past year as other expenses have gone up, including a nearly 50% increase in her electric bill, to more than $300 a month. She recently canceled her cable service, which was costing her $257 a month, and now pays for just one streaming service. She stopped paying $600 a month for her and her husband’s long-term care insurance — deciding instead that if one of them has to go into a long-term care facility, they will sell their home to pay for it.

Living situation: Breland says she and her husband, who have been married for more than three decades, lived a comfortable life during their prime working years and saved regularly for retirement.

They have lived for 24 years in their current home in Brunswick, Georgia, a historic port town in the southeast corner of the state popular with vacationers. To keep busy after she retired, Breland took a part-time job at a hospital blood bank and was volunteering at a local sea turtle center and with her church. 

Breland said she has considered moving into an apartment that would have less maintenance, but a typical one-bedroom in her community goes for a minimum of $1,200 a month, and that would leave her with little space for her three dogs. She has little extra money to cover major one-time expenses, like a home repair, a vet bill or dental work, because her savings are largely tied up in retirement investment accounts.

Selling off any of those investments would leave her with less in monthly returns to live off. She would like to go back to working part time for some extra income but is worried about leaving her husband alone because of his health needs.

Economic outlook: Inflation has taken a particularly painful bite out of the budgets of retirees who aren’t able to reap the benefits of rising wages. While Social Security checks have increased relative to inflation, other sources of income for retirees, like pension payments and retirement savings accounts, haven’t necessarily kept up for many. 

Breland said her life took a turn financially and emotionally about three years ago when her husband and her brother became ill around the same time. As a full-time caretaker to both of them, Breland had to quit her part-time job as, she said, her days became consumed with doctor’s appointments and hospital stays.

“I spend all my time at three people’s doctor’s appointments, mine and theirs. It just wears you down. I’m just really tired of taking care of everybody,” she said. “My life, I thought before this, was perfect. That is what is really distressing to me emotionally. I was loving my job. I was loving volunteering.”

Budget pain points: Her monthly housing costs are around $1,600 a month for her mortgage, taxes and insurance, and they have been on the rise. Her homeowners insurance has gone from just under $2,000 in 2022 to $2,820 this year, and her flood insurance has gone from $525 in 2020 to $840, even though her home isn’t at high risk for flooding. Insurance for some of her neighbors has increased to as much as $5,000 a year.

Because her savings are largely tied up in retirement investment accounts, Breland had to take out a home equity loan recently to cover the cost of removing some dead trees and repairing the steps to her house. She still owes $10,000 on the loan.

What’s going well? After cutting some of her costs recently, paying off her car and receiving an increase in the minimum amount she is required to withdraw from her retirement investment account, she said, Breland has a bit more breathing room in her monthly budget.

Despite all of her husband’s medical issues over the past several years, she said, her health care costs have been mostly covered by a supplemental Medicare plan the couple pays around $350 a month for.

“We really are doing much better than we were. If we hadn’t had that medical insurance, it would not be a good thing here,” she said. “At least I’ve got a nice view from my back porch. I can sit here with my dog and my cold beer at night. But it’s not the only thing I wanted to be doing.”

What’s on her mind: Beyond her finances, Breland said that being the sole caretaker for her husband has taken its toll emotionally and left her feeling she is missing out on what were supposed to be some of her best years.

“I’m really frustrated, because there are a lot of things I thought I’d do at this stage of my life. I thought I would be traveling a lot. I wanted to see the Grand Canyon, I wanted to see Montana, I wanted to go out West,” she said. “I feel like I’m stuck here. I had this vision that I was going to do all these things, and it’s not going to happen. It’s terrible to say this, but I’m really envious when I look on Facebook and I see people I went to high school with and they’re off doing all these great things with their husbands everywhere.”

How she sees things: More widely, Breland said, she doesn’t think the economy is going in the right direction.

As a volunteer with her church, she said, she has seen an “overwhelming” number of people struggling with the rising cost of housing, transportation and groceries. 

“I’m looking at people trying to find a place to live in this town. I do not know how they afford rent when a one-bedroom apartment is over $1,200 a month, then suppose they have kids. I don’t know how they afford anything.”

The NBA announced a new media deal late Wednesday that would end its long-standing relationship with TNT, while adding and restarting partnerships with Amazon and NBC — expanding the reach of professional hoops but potentially posing new access issues to fans.

Starting in the 2025-2026 season, existing partner ABC and its sister network ESPN will now share broadcast rights with Amazon Prime Video, NBC and the NBCUniversal-owned Peacock. The league is seeking to wind down its 35-year tie-up with TNT, although it is now facing a lawsuit from TNT’s parent, Warner Bros. Discovery, as it does so.

Barring a dramatic last-minute change, all of this means the upcoming 2024-2025 season will be the last to feature the popular ‘NBA on TNT’ broadcast. Co-anchor and NBA Hall of Famer Charles Barkley said last month he would retire from TV following this season.

“Our new global media agreements with Disney, NBCUniversal and Amazon will maximize the reach and accessibility of NBA games for fans in the United States and around the world,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement. “These partners will distribute our content across a wide range of platforms and help transform the fan experience over the next decade.”

Comcast’s NBCUniversal is the parent company of NBC News.

The new arrangement means that a year from now, NBA fans looking for a complete national viewing schedule will have to subscribe to two streaming platforms: Peacock and Amazon Prime Video. And if they want to avoid traditional TV entirely, they’ll need a third: ESPN’s upcoming streaming service.

Still, many games will be available through traditional broadcast channels on ABC and NBC, and through cable via ESPN. The NBA will continue to sell a separate League Pass subscription that starts at $14.99 a month.

Here’s what a sample basketball week looks like according to the new agreement:

Early-round playoff games will also be split up among the networks; ABC will remain the exclusive home of the NBA Finals.

The deal also includes expanded WNBA coverage among those networks, with 125 games slated to be televised.

The deal marks a return of the basketball league to NBC after a run from 1990 to 2002 that coincided with the game’s rise to international popularity led by stars such as Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant. Mike Tirico will anchor the network’s coverage, NBC Sports President Rick Cordella told Richard Deitsch of The Athletic on Wednesday.

For the past 22 years, games have been split among ABC, ESPN (both owned by Disney) and TNT. The most recent agreements with those networks generated $24 billion, according to CNBC.

With the new deal, the NBA has nearly tripled that figure to approximately $76 billion, according to The Associated Press.

Live sporting events are highly coveted by broadcast groups because of the viewership they can command. This year’s regular season averaged 1.09 million viewers across ABC, ESPN, TNT and the league-owned NBA TV. While that was up just 1% from last year, it was the highest all-network average in four years, according to Sports Media Watch. 

Last year’s NBA playoffs was the most watched in 11 years, according to Nielsen.

In fact, annual ratings churn is not necessarily the most important part of the negotiations for sports broadcast rights. Rather, the slate of games themselves — known as ‘inventory’ in the industry — is valuable in itself as it ensures a consistent audience.

‘Inventory is what matters,’ said Jon Lewis, who runs SportsMediaWatch.com. ‘If you’re trying to build up a streaming service like Peacock, or Amazon sports, that inventory is a big deal. They’re clearly willing to pay a lot for it.’

OpenAI on Thursday announced a prototype of its own search engine, called SearchGPT, which aims to give users “fast and timely answers with clear and relevant sources.”

The company said it eventually plans to integrate the tool, which is currently being alpha-tested with a small group of users, into its viral chatbot, ChatGPT.

Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, Alphabet investors have been concerned that OpenAI could take market share from Google in search by giving consumers new ways to seek information online. With this prototype, OpenAI is testing the waters for doing just that, promising users the chance to “search in a more natural, intuitive way” and ask follow-up questions “just like you would in a conversation.”

“We think there is room to make search much better than it is today,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote Thursday in a post on X.

Alphabet shares were trading about 2.5% lower on Thursday, while the Nasdaq was up slightly.

In May, Google launched AI Overview, which CEO Sundar Pichai called the biggest change in search in 25 years, to a limited audience, allowing users to see a summary of answers to queries at the very top of Google Search.

Though Google had been working on AI Overview for more than a year, public criticism mounted after users quickly noticed that queries returned nonsensical or inaccurate results within the AI feature — without any way to opt out.

The SearchGPT announcement follows OpenAI’s launch last Thursday of a new AI model, “GPT-4o mini.” The new model is an offshoot of GPT-4o, the startup’s fastest and most powerful model to date, which it launched in May during a livestreamed event with executives. 

OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, has been valued at more than $80 billion by investors. The company, founded in 2015, is under pressure to stay on top of the generative AI market while finding ways to make money as it spends massive sums on processors and infrastructure to build and train its models.

Last Month, OpenAI announced the hiring of two top executives as well as a partnership with Apple that includes a ChatGPT-Siri integration. Sarah Friar, previously CEO of Nextdoor and finance chief at Square, joined as chief financial officer, and Kevin Weil, an ex-president at Planet Labs and former senior vice president at Twitter and a vice president at Facebook and Instagram, joined as chief product officer.

OpenAI is bolstering its C-suite as its large language models gain importance across the tech sector and as competition rapidly emerges in the burgeoning generative artificial intelligence market. 

Both OpenAI’s new mini AI model and the prototype of SearchGPT are also part of the company’s push to be at the forefront of “multimodality,” or the ability to offer a wide range of types of AI-generated media, like text, images, audio, video and search, inside one tool: ChatGPT.

For SearchGPT, OpenAI’s blog post said the tool’s visual results will lead to “richer understanding” for users.

Last year, OpenAI Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap told CNBC: “The world is multimodal. If you think about the way we as humans process the world and engage with the world, we see things, we hear things, we say things — the world is much bigger than text. So to us, it always felt incomplete for text and code to be the single modalities, the single interfaces that we could have to how powerful these models are and what they can do.”

Boeing’s crew spacecraft Starliner will stay docked with the International Space Station into August, NASA confirmed on Thursday, as the mission remains on hold while the company and agency study problems that arose early in the flight.

Starliner capsule “Calypso,” which carried NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the ISS, has now been in space 50 days and counting. The Boeing crew flight test has been extended several times while NASA conducted testing back on the ground prior to clearing the spacecraft to carry the pair of astronauts back to Earth.

NASA’s Commercial Crew manager Steve Stich said during a press conference Thursday that the agency was not prepared to set a return date.

“We’re making great progress, but we’re just not quite ready to do that,” Stich said.

NASA needs to conduct a review that won’t happen until the first week of August, Stich said, and only after that review will the agency schedule Starliner’s return.

The indefinite extension of Starliner’s flight test is difficult to put into context of other human spaceflights due to the unique circumstances and developmental nature of the mission. Any crewed spaceflight comes with heightened risk and scrutiny. Originally, Calypso was expected to spend a minimum of nine days in space before returning.

“I think we all knew that it was going to go longer than that. We didn’t spend a lot of time talking about how much longer, but I think it’s my regret that we we didn’t just say we’re going to stay up there until we get everything done that we want to go to do,” Stich said on Thursday.

Both NASA and Boeing leadership have repeatedly stressed that Wilmore and Williams “are not stranded in space.” Officials previously said that Starliner is safe to return in the event of an emergency and that the pair of astronauts are enjoying the extra time on the ISS and assisting the rest of the station’s crew with tasks in the meantime.

Boeing and NASA earlier this month began testing the spacecraft’s malfunctioning propulsion system back on the ground in White Sands, New Mexico.

Stich and Boeing’s Mark Nappi, vice president of the Starliner program, outlined the next steps that must be completed before making the call on when to bring back Starliner.

Boeing on Thursday is finishing dissection of the thruster that was tested in New Mexico. On Thursday afternoon, NASA and Boeing will hold a mission management meeting to plan the docked test firings that are expected to happen on Saturday or Sunday. Then, on Monday or Tuesday, the teams will do “an integrated assessment of all the data” from the docked tests, Stich said, before “some significant education of [NASA] leadership” ahead the final big review, also known as “Agency Flight Test Readiness Review.”

Stich also acknowledged again that NASA has contingency plans in case the agency determines that Starliner should return without Wilmore and Williams — alternatives that include using SpaceX’s Dragon capsule to bring back NASA’s astronauts.

“NASA always has contingency options. We know a little bit of what those are, and we haven’t worked on them a whole bunch, but we kind of know what those are,” Stich said. “Right now we’re really focused on bringing Butch and Suni home on Starliner.”

Southwest Airlines is ending open seating and will offer extra legroom seats on its airplanes as mounting pressure on the carrier to increase revenue prompts the biggest changes to its business model in its 53 years of flying.

The airline plans to start selling the first flights that will offer extra legroom next year, it said Thursday. It also plans to begin overnight flights, starting in February.

Southwest executives have said for years that they were studying such changes and hinted in April that the airline was seriously considering assigning seats and offering pricier seats with more legroom. The airline currently puts customers in one of three boarding groups and assigns a number, setting off a mad dash to check in a day before the flight. Customers can get earlier boarding though if they pay for a higher-priced ticket, they’ll get a better boarding slot.

When travelers choose a competitor over Southwest, the airline found in its research that its open seating model was the No. 1 reason for that choice, the carrier said in a release that outlined the changes. It also said 80% of its own customers prefer an assigned seat.

“Although our unique open seating model has been a part of Southwest Airlines since our inception, our thoughtful and extensive research makes it clear this is the right choice — at the right time — for our Customers, our People, and our Shareholders,” CEO Bob Jordan said in a news release Thursday.

Southwest did not, however, unveil any changes to its beloved two free checked bags policy.

The airline is under even more pressure now to segment its product like other airlines after activist investor Elliott Investment Management disclosed in June a nearly $2 billion stake in Southwest and called for new leadership as the carrier underperformed competitors.

“We will adapt as our customers’ needs adapt,” Jordan said at an industry event last month.

Southwest said it expects about a third of the seats on its Boeing 737s will offer “extended legroom, in line with that offered by industry peers on narrowbody aircraft.” The Federal Aviation Administration would need to approve the cabin layouts, the airline added.

The Dallas-based carrier had prided itself and raked in steady profits for most of its more than five decades of flying on its simple business model. Jordan said last month that not assigning seats was easier to offer when planes weren’t so full.

Analysts criticized Southwest for moving too slowly. Rival carriers offer a host of options to upsell customers like extra legroom seats, premium economy or business class. Other airlines, however, like Delta, United and American, four years ago took a cue from Southwest and ended flight change fees for most tickets.

Southwest will provide more details about the upcoming changes at an investor day at the end of September.

An important gauge for the Federal Reserve showed inflation eased slightly from a year ago in June, helping to open the way for a widely anticipated September interest rate cut.

The personal consumption expenditures price index increased 0.1% on the month and was up 2.5% from a year ago, in line with Dow Jones estimates, the Commerce Department reported Friday. The year-over-year gain in May was 2.6%, while the monthly measure was unchanged.

Fed officials use the PCE measure as their main baseline to gauge inflation, which continues to run above the central bank’s 2% long-range target.

Core inflation, which excludes food and energy, showed a monthly increase of 0.2% and 2.6% on the year, both also in line with expectations. Policymakers focus even more on core as a better gauge of longer-run trends as gas and groceries costs tend to fluctuate more than other items.

Stock market futures indicated a positive open on Wall Street following the release while Treasury yields moved lower. Futures markets price in a more aggressive path for Fed interest rate cuts.

“A two-word summary of the report is, ‘good enough,’” said Robert Frick, corporate economist with Navy Federal Credit Union. “Spending is good enough to maintain the expansion, and income is good enough to maintain spending, and the level of PCE inflation is good enough to make the decision to cut rates easy for the Fed.”

Goods prices fell 0.2% on the month while services increased 0.2%. Housing-related prices in June rose 0.3%, a slight deceleration from the 0.4% increase in each of the last three months and the smallest monthly gain going back at least to January 2023.

The report also indicated that personal income rose just 0.2%, below the 0.4% estimate. Spending increased 0.3%, meeting the forecast.

As spending held relatively strong, the savings rate decreased to 3.4%, hitting its lowest level since November 2022.

The report comes with markets paying close attention to which way the Fed is headed on monetary policy.

There’s little expectation that the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee will make any moves at its policy meeting next Tuesday and Wednesday. However, market pricing is pointing strongly to a rate cut at the September meeting, which would be the first reduction since the early days of the Covid pandemic.

“Overall, it’s been a good week for the Fed. The economy appears to be on solid ground, and PCE inflation essentially remained steady,” said Chris Larkin, managing director of trading and investing at E-Trade Morgan Stanley. “But a rate cut next week remains a longshot. And while there’s plenty of time for the economic picture to change before the September FOMC meeting, the numbers have been trending in the Fed’s direction.”

As inflation rose to its highest level in more than 40 years in mid-2022, the Fed embarked on a series of aggressive hikes that took its benchmark borrowing rate to its highest level in some 23 years. However, the Fed has been on pause for the past year as it evaluates fluctuating data that earlier this year showed a resurgence in inflation but lately has displayed a gradual cooling that has many policymakers discussing the likelihood of at least one cut this year.

Futures markets have priced in about a 90% chance of a September reduction followed by cuts at both the November and December FOMC meetings, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch measure.

Fed officials, though, have been cautious in their remarks and have stressed that there is no set policy path, with data guiding the way.