Budget airline blues — and why six figures feels tight

Welcome back to MoneyNerd! This week: Food insecurity is on the rise, putting more pressure on your friendly neighborhood food bank. 

Also this week:

A hill of beans.

That’s pretty much what we — a group of volunteers that included three NerdWallet colleagues and me — were faced with when we started a volunteer shift last week at Food Lifeline, a regional food bank in Seattle.  

Our task: Scoop dried pinto beans from 2,000-pound sacks into carefully weighed one-pound bags, then pack those bags 15 to a box for eventual distribution to 315 agency partners throughout Western Washington.

In a two-hour shift, our team of about 20 volunteers packaged 2,400 bags. That’s a lot of beans, I can confirm — but zooming out, it’s a mere drop in the bucket when compared to the volume of food that flows through a big regional operation like Food Lifeline. In fiscal year 2025, the organization distributed more than 73 million pounds of food, serving more than 2 million people.

Zooming out even further, Feeding America (a national network of food banks) reported more than 7.2 billion pounds of food sourced in fiscal year 2025. 

Is that enough to meet rising levels of food insecurity? Food banks are finding out in real time.

Food banks came under increasing demand in 2025, and much of that can be attributed to turbulence in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program, formerly known as food stamps. 

First came the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), which tightened eligibility requirements and shifted some costs to states. Between July 2025, when the bill went into effect, and January 2026, SNAP participation fell about 8%, or by about 3 million people, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan policy institute. The decline was even more pronounced in some states, with Arizona leading the pack with a 47% drop in SNAP enrollees. 

SNAP participation will likely continue to drop this year, as states begin to implement OBBBA-mandated work requirements. The lengthy government shutdown last fall, during which SNAP payments were disrupted, led to a sharp spike in demand reported by many food banks at the time.  

Persistent inflation and a stagnant job market are also contributing to rising demand. I talked to Pascha Scott, marketing and communications director at Food Lifeline, for her perspective on what’s happening. 

“Our network of 315 partners reported 16 million visits last fiscal year, which is an increase of 60% over the year before,” Scott said. “We don't yet have our numbers for fiscal year ‘26, which ends in July, but we expect that we will see an increase again based on what we're hearing.”

To top it off, Food Lifeline and its partners are also hit directly by the war-triggered spike in fuel prices. “Our monthly fuel purchases, January to March, actually doubled. And our agency partners are also seeing those increases,” Scott said.

I also spoke to Calib Miller, executive director of the Snoqualmie Valley Food Bank, a local food bank based in North Bend, WA. He said his organization has seen a 21% increase in demand this year, over 10% of them new clients — many of whom, he said, “never really imagined they would need these services.”

Contact your local or regional food bank, which relies heavily on volunteer labor as well as food and cash donations. At Food Lifeline in Seattle, for instance, 14,023 volunteers contributed more than 45,000 hours of labor in fiscal year 2025. Tip: Check to see if your company matches volunteer time with dollars (our time at the food bank was matched by NerdWallet).

The good news is that charitable giving to food banks rose in 2025. The caveat, according to Pascha Scott, is that charity can’t make up all the gap created by cutbacks in government assistance. 

- Rick VanderKnyff

A: Alas, no. Even though the wheels of tariff refunds are (slowly) turning, there are still global tariffs in place — and a war that’s making fuel prices go up. And as long as fuel prices stay high (or get higher), the cost of goods will likely stay up as well, says Rathna Sharad, founder and CEO of FlavorCloud, an AI customs and logistics platform. 

“Fuel is such a universal thing,” Sharad says. “It doesn’t matter where you buy from or which brand. Everyone is impacted the same way with fuel.” 

Industries have seen fuel surcharges go up 15% to 20%, Sharad says. Merchants can’t absorb all of those costs by themselves, so those costs have to be passed on to the consumer, either through higher shipping costs or higher prices generally. 

“It’s not intuitive, because it’s not something you see in your checkout shopping cart — ‘fuel surcharge,’” Sharad says. “But you should really see that everything costs more.” 

- Kate Ashford

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The war in Iran is stress-testing budget airlines, highlighting weaknesses in the model itself and raising fresh concerns for investors, travelers and policymakers. 

Fuel prices have roughly doubled since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, and continue to rise after the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz — a key chokepoint that handles roughly 20% of global oil supply. As a result, U.S. airlines are bracing for higher costs: Last week, the U.S.-based carrier United said it may need to increase airfares by 15% to 20% to offset jet fuel spikes. 

All airlines are feeling the pressure from high fuel prices, but the most exposed are budget carriers. Airlines with more pricing power can just pass higher costs on to customers. Ultra-low-cost carriers — built on rock-bottom fares and razor-thin margins — don’t have that luxury.

The most visible casualty in the budget space is Spirit Airlines. It has filed for bankruptcy twice in the past 18 months, and the fuel surge has piled on hundreds of millions in unexpected costs. Spirit is now in talks over a potential $500 million government bailout to stay afloat.

What’s not clear is if this is a Spirit Airlines issue, or a larger warning sign about the limits of the ultra-budget model.

Airlines across the board have started cutting routes, shrinking fleets, adding fuel surcharges and raising fares — with airfare costs already up roughly 15% year-over-year, according to NerdWallet’s Travel Price Index. Meanwhile, investors are reassessing carriers like Frontier (ULCC) and Ryanair (RYAAY). Shares of both are down more than 15% so far in 2026. 

For travelers, it raises a practical question: What happens to cheap flights if airlines can't survive fuel spikes?

To dive deeper into how the budget airline model could expose travelers and investors to greater risk — and what you can do to stay ahead — read the full discussion with NerdWallet writers Anna Helhoski (economics), Craig Joseph (travel) and Sam Taube (investing).

- Anna Helhoski

AI tools are making it easier than ever for scammers to defraud consumers. 

Not only can scammers use AI to create fake videos and audio to impersonate authority figures — or even family members — but they can also use AI to sort through data sets and create more targeted outreach to potential victims.

The FBI reports that cybercrime continues to climb, reaching over 1 million complaints last year for a total of $20.877 billion in reported losses. That’s a 26% increase in losses over the previous year. 

Here are some ways to stay safe: 

- Kimberly Palmer

The K-shaped economy is the reason your financial life can feel hard even when you're doing everything right.

In the latest Smart Money podcast, senior news writer Anna Helhoski talks to NerdWallet home mortgage writers Abby Badach Doyle and Kate Wood to examine why 2026's spring housing market is falling short of expectations. They explain what declining home sales data and 30-year mortgage rates hovering above 6% reveal about buyer and seller hesitation, how economic uncertainty is driving different outcomes across local markets around the country, and whether the timing is right to make a move.

Watch the segment below or get the full audio version.

Your MoneyNerd team: Courtney Neidel, Anna Helhoski, Rick VanderKnyff.

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