Author: EXIT DESK

  • Your Landlord Raised the Rent Again. New Jersey Law Has One Word for You: Unconscionable.

    Your Landlord Raised the Rent Again. New Jersey Law Has One Word for You: Unconscionable.

    The letter shows up and it is not even a letter. It is a paragraph. Your rent is going up, the new number starts on the first, thank you for being a valued resident. Valued. Like a coupon.

    And your first question is everybody’s first question: can they just do that?

    In New Jersey, the honest answer is: mostly, yes, but not any way they want, and not at any number they feel like. This state has no cap on rent increases. None. There is no law in Trenton that says rent can only rise 3 percent or 5 percent or any percent. But “no cap” is not the same as “no rules,” and the rules that exist have teeth if you know where they are. So let us find them.

    Rule one: timing. They cannot raise it mid-lease.

    The state Department of Community Affairs puts this plainly in its Rent Increase Bulletin: a landlord may only increase the rent at the beginning of a new lease term. The landlord cannot increase your rent while a lease exists. If you signed for twelve months at one number, that number is your number until the term ends. A mid-lease increase is not aggressive negotiation. It is just not how this works.

    Rule two: notice, in writing, done the right way

    Before a landlord can raise your rent, they have to give you a written Notice to Quit along with the notice of the rent increase. That notice has to land within the timeframe your lease sets out, at least 30 days, or whatever your local rent control ordinance requires if your town has one. The increase takes effect when the old term ends and a new tenancy begins at the higher rate, and the landlord has to offer you that new term. It is a process, not a text message. If your landlord raised your rent with a sticky note and a deadline of Friday, that is not a process. That is a wish.

    One side note nobody mentions until it bites: when the rent goes up, the landlord can raise your security deposit too, but the deposit still cannot exceed one and a half months of the rent. The cap does not move just because the rent did.

    Rule three: your town might have a cap even though the state does not

    Here is where New Jersey gets very New Jersey. The state does not control rent, but towns can. Roughly 120 of the state’s municipalities have their own rent control or rent leveling ordinances, according to the Department of Community Affairs’ rent control survey, each with its own limits, its own board, and its own paperwork. Two apartments on the same street can be under different rules if the street crosses a town line. (Of course it works that way here. Everything here works that way here.)

    The way to find out is embarrassingly simple: call the municipal clerk in the town where you live and ask whether a rent control ordinance exists and whether it covers your unit. The DCA literally tells tenants to do exactly that. Five minutes on the phone can turn “my rent went up 12 percent” into “that increase was never legal in this town.”

    Rule four: the big one. It cannot be unconscionable.

    Even where there is no local cap, New Jersey’s Anti-Eviction Act says a landlord can only evict you for refusing a rent increase if that increase is not unconscionable and complies with the other laws and ordinances that apply. That word, unconscionable, is the whole ballgame. The statute does not define it with a percentage, because there is not one. It gets decided case by case, by a judge, looking at things like how big the increase is, what comparable rents look like, and what the landlord is actually providing for the money.

    And here is the move the DCA itself describes, which surprises people: if you believe an increase is unconscionable, you can keep paying your old rent and withhold only the increase while the dispute gets decided in court. You are not refusing to pay rent. You are refusing to pay the part you are challenging, and you let a judge sort it out. That is a serious step, and I am not a lawyer, so treat it like one. But it exists, it is written down by the state, and most tenants have never heard of it. Landlords are counting on that, some of them. The honest ones are not worried about you knowing it.

    What I would do with that letter

    Read your lease for the notice period before you do anything. Check with your town clerk about a rent control ordinance. Do the math on the increase as a percentage, not just a dollar amount, because judges think in percentages even when your budget thinks in dollars. And keep everything in writing. If it is not in writing, in this state, it is basically a rumor.

    None of this makes the increase smaller. I know that. Rent in New Jersey is a hard subject and I am not going to dress it up. But there is a difference between a legal increase you have to absorb and an improper one you only absorbed because nobody told you the rules. The first one is life. The second one is optional.

    Your landlord read the rules before he sent that letter. Now you have too.

    Related reading on Exit Desk:

  • Two NJ Property Tax Benefits for Veterans That Nobody Files For

    There are two property tax benefits in New Jersey with a veteran’s name on them, and the state does not hand you either one. You have to file. With your town. On paper forms with names like V.S.S. and D.V.S.S.E., which sound like a password a tired clerk made up in 1974. So a lot of veterans never file, and the money just sits there, year after year, being unclaimed by the exact people it was written for.

    I am a veteran in this state, and I talk to veterans in this state, and I will tell you the honest pattern: most of us assume Trenton handles it. Trenton does not handle it. Your municipal tax assessor handles it, and only after you walk in with the forms and the proof. Here is both benefits, plain, with the actual rules from the Division of Taxation.

    The small one: $250 a year, every year

    If you are an honorably discharged veteran with active duty service in the United States Armed Forces, you may qualify for an annual $250 deduction from your property taxes. It is not a fortune. It is also every year, forever, for the price of one form, which is the best hourly wage most paperwork ever pays you.

    The rules, as of October 1 of the pretax year: you must be a legal resident of New Jersey, you must own the property, and you must have the active duty service and the honorable discharge. Guard and Reserve members, listen up, because this is where guys get tripped: you qualify only if you were called to active duty. Active duty for training does not count. The state draws that line in ink.

    A surviving spouse, civil union partner, or domestic partner who has not remarried can claim it too. And one detail worth knowing, because New Jersey means tests almost everything else: the Division’s page for this deduction lists no income limit. Rich, poor, in between, the $250 does not care.

    You file Form V.S.S., with your documentary proofs, your DD 214 is the big one, at your local assessor or tax collector. If they deny you, you can appeal to the County Board of Taxation on Form A-1 by April 1, or by January 15 if you live in Burlington, Gloucester, or Monmouth County. Yes, three counties get a different deadline. No, nobody can explain that at a kitchen table either.

    The big one: the whole tax bill, gone

    Now the benefit that actually changes a life in the most expensive property tax state in the country. If you are an honorably discharged veteran who was 100 percent permanently and totally disabled during active duty service, New Jersey exempts your principal residence from property taxes. Not a discount. Not a freeze. The bill goes to zero.

    The qualifications are exact, and they should be, because the benefit is enormous. You need the active duty service and the honorable discharge. You need to be a legal resident of New Jersey. You need to own and occupy the house as your main home. And you need the piece of paper that runs the whole show: a certification from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs stating your disability is service connected and 100 percent permanent and total. A temporary 100 percent rating is not the same animal. The VA letter has to say permanent and total.

    A surviving spouse or partner who has not remarried can qualify on the same terms. And here is a piece of recent history that matters to a lot of guys my age: you no longer have to have served in a specific war or emergency period. Voters approved that change in November 2020, through the law passed in 2019. If somebody told you years ago that your service era did not count, that answer expired. Ask again.

    You file Form D.V.S.S.E. with your local assessor, with the VA certification and your proofs. Same appeal route if you are denied, Form A-1, same county deadlines.

    Why nobody files

    Partly it is the forms. Partly it is that the two benefits live on a state website organized by people who have never once stood in a VFW hall and tried to explain them. But mostly, I think, it is the assumption. We assume the VA tells the state, the state tells the town, and the town knocks on the door with good news. That is not how any of this works. The VA knows your rating. Your town knows your tax bill. Those two computers have never been introduced.

    So the whole job is you, carrying one file folder across one parking lot. DD 214. VA letter if you are going for the exemption. Twenty minutes at the assessor’s office. Guys have done harder paperwork for a parking pass.

    One last thing, because veterans leave this on the table too: these two benefits come straight off your property tax bill, and they are separate from ANCHOR, the state relief check I wrote about this week. Claiming the deduction does not knock you out of ANCHOR. The exemption and the check are different programs run by different offices that, again, do not talk to each other. If you qualify for both, you file for both, in both places, like a man delivering the same news to two houses on the same street because nobody else will.

    The flat version

    New Jersey wrote veterans a $250 deduction and wrote totally disabled veterans a complete property tax exemption, and then made both of them opt-in through municipal forms with alphabet-soup names. If you served, file for the $250. If the VA has you at 100 percent permanent and total, file for the exemption and stop paying the highest property taxes in America on a bill the state already agreed you should not owe. The money is not coming to find you. It never was. Go get it.

    Related reading on Exit Desk:

    Sources (all NJ Division of Taxation, verified November 12, 2026):

  • New Jersey Keeps Your Plate Data for Three Years

    Drive to the grocery store in New Jersey today and there is a decent chance a camera read your license plate on the way, logged where you were and when, and filed it away. Not because you did anything. Because you drove. That is how the system is built, it reads everybody, and in this state it keeps the record for three years.

    Three years. I am going to say the comparison out loud because it is the whole story: most states hold this data about 30 days. New Jersey holds it roughly 36 times longer, in one statewide system, and you cannot look up whether your own plate has ever been searched. The cameras are not a secret. Their locations are.

    How it got this big, this quiet

    A two-person investigation at NJ.com, published July 29, 2026, did the counting that nobody in Trenton seemed in a hurry to do. They found automated license plate readers in 523 of roughly 530 law enforcement agencies in New Jersey. Nearly universal is not a figure of speech here. It is a headcount. If your town has a police department, it almost certainly has plate readers, from Flock Safety or one of the other vendors selling the same idea.

    The plumbing matters more than the cameras. Under a 2022 Attorney General directive, Directive 2022-12, every agency’s scans feed into one statewide system, NJ SNAP. Your trip to get milk in Ocean County does not stay in Ocean County. It goes into a state pool that agencies across New Jersey can search, and sharing agreements reach further than that. Edison, to pick the town currently in the fight, shares its data with 88 agencies, including federal ones and police in other states.

    The oversight is thin enough to read through. The state audit samples only a small share of searches, and skips searches run by outside agencies entirely. So the honest summary is: the state built a three-year memory of where your car has been, the public cannot see where the cameras are, and you personally cannot check whether anybody ever pulled your file. Other than that, very transparent.

    Edison is what the fight looks like

    On September 23, 2026, Edison’s council voted to expand the town’s Flock camera network from 22 cameras to 114, a contract worth roughly $589,000, which would give Edison more plate readers than any other municipality in the state. On October 14, residents showed up to the council meeting and pushed back, hard, asking the council to pause or cancel the deal. They raised the Fourth Amendment, they raised ICE, they raised the audit numbers. One councilman has talked about a local law making misuse of the data a crime.

    Edison is not an outlier. It is just the town where the meeting got loud. The same vote, quieter, has happened in hundreds of New Jersey towns, usually as a line item, usually without anybody in the audience knowing the words license plate reader were on the agenda. (Consent agendas are where democracy goes to wear sweatpants.) Washington Township in Gloucester County paid for Flock cameras and police SUVs out of its opioid settlement account, money the state says is restricted to addiction treatment and recovery. That is not a privacy argument. That is a what-did-you-buy argument, and it writes itself.

    Trenton has noticed, barely

    On September 14, 2026, Assemblyman David Bailey Jr. introduced bills that would actually change the numbers. A5481 would require stored plate data to be deleted within 180 days. A5483 goes further, a 48-hour default deletion, and it would ban private companies and individuals from running plate readers at all. Both are proposals, not law. They were introduced, they were referred, and now they sit in the part of Trenton where good ideas go to be studied until the session ends.

    New Jersey also passed the Privacy Protection Act in March 2026, which bars state agencies from sharing plate data for civil immigration enforcement. That is a real line on a real page. It is also narrower than the problem, and advocates will tell you the sharing gaps around it are wide enough to drive a searched plate through.

    What you can actually do

    You cannot opt out of being read. There is no form. But you can see part of the map. DeFlock, at maps.deflock.org, is a volunteer project that plots plate reader locations people have spotted and reported, on OpenStreetMap. It is incomplete by nature, a camera only shows up after somebody notices it, but zoom in on your town and you will learn more in two minutes than your council told you in two years.

    You can also ask, in public, on the record, at a meeting: How many cameras does this town run, where does the data go, who can search it, and how long is it kept? Those are not gotcha questions. They are the basic specs of a system pointed at every driver in town, and any official who cannot answer them is telling you something by accident.

    The flat version

    The cameras solve real crimes. Stolen cars get found, and nobody at the meeting is confused about that part. The question was never whether the tool works. The question is whether a free state keeps a three-year, statewide, searchable record of where every car has been, with secret camera locations, thin audits, and no way for you to check your own file. New Jersey answered that question without ever really asking it. The bills to shorten the three years exist. Whether they move is the next chapter, and it is being written in rooms most of us never walk into.

    Related reading on Exit Desk:

    Sources:

    • NJ.com investigation by Jana Cholakovska and Gavin Schweiger (July 29, 2026): license plate readers in 523 of roughly 530 New Jersey law enforcement agencies; data retained three years under a 2022 Attorney General directive feeding one statewide system; camera locations secret; residents cannot learn whether their plate was searched; Edison shares with 88 agencies.
    • NJ Attorney General Directive 2022-12: agency ALPR scans feed the statewide NJ SNAP system, retained three years.
    • Edison Township Council (September 23, 2026 approval; October 14, 2026 meeting): Flock Safety expansion from 22 to 114 cameras, contract about $589,000, paid with asset forfeiture funds per the police chief; residents urged cancellation.
    • NJ Legislature: A5481 (delete stored ALPR data within 180 days) and A5483 (48-hour default deletion, ban on private ALPR operation), both introduced September 14, 2026.
    • NJ Privacy Protection Act (signed March 25, 2026): bars NJ government entities from sharing plate reader data for civil immigration enforcement.
    • DeFlock, volunteer ALPR map built on OpenStreetMap: https://maps.deflock.org

  • How Much Water Does a Data Center Actually Use?

    Somewhere right now there is a town meeting where a guy in a folding chair is standing up to say that a data center is going to drink his well dry, poison the aquifer, and leave his grandkids fighting over a garden hose. I am not making fun of the guy. (I have been the guy in the folding chair, about other things.) But before your town votes on one of these buildings, and towns all over this state are voting on them right now, it is worth knowing what the water numbers actually are. Because the real answer is smaller than the panic, bigger than the brochure, and weird in a way nobody at the microphone is saying.

    The question is not fringe. “Data center water usage” is searched about 9,900 times a month in this country, and it is up more than 600 percent in a year. People are not idly curious. A building the size of a small city is going up near their house and they want to know what it drinks.

    The bottle of water claim, taken apart

    The version flying around says every AI prompt you type costs about a bottle of water. That exact question, is it true that one AI prompt uses a bottle of water, gets searched roughly 8,100 times a month. Eight thousand people a month typing a rumor into Google to find out if it is real. That tells you something about where we are.

    Here is the honest version. Cooling a building full of computers takes water, and some of that water evaporates, and evaporated water is gone the way your money at the track is gone. But the per-prompt math behind the bottle claim takes the thirstiest kind of facility, in the hottest kind of place, and spreads it across your one question about a casserole recipe. Most facilities are not that facility. The claim is not a lie exactly. It is a worst case wearing a trench coat, pretending to be the average.

    What the one serious state study found

    Virginia is the data center capital of the world, so Virginia’s own legislative watchdog, JLARC, went and looked at the actual numbers and published them in December 2024. Their finding is the least exciting sentence in this whole fight, which is usually a sign it is the true one: most data centers use about as much water as a large office building.

    Sit with that. Not a reservoir. Not a river. An office building. The kind with a fountain in the lobby that has not worked since 2019.

    Now, the watchdog said most, and most is doing real work in that sentence. A few facilities use far more, and the design is the whole ballgame. A building cooled mostly by air uses very little water. A building cooled by evaporation uses a lot, especially in August. Same company, same logo on the fence, completely different drinker. Which is why the only number that matters for your town is not a national average. It is the number in that project’s permit, the ceiling the state lets them draw, in writing, before anybody breaks ground. If the people pitching the project cannot hand you that number, the meeting is not over, no matter what the clock says.

    One more fact that surprises people: according to the Congressional Research Service, about 97 percent of the water American data centers use comes from municipal systems. It is not a secret well in the woods. It is the same public water system your kitchen tap is on, which is exactly why it is a public question and not a private one.

    The water is not even the biggest bill

    Here is the part that gets lost. The fight is usually about water because water is easy to picture. But the heavier number is electricity. The International Energy Agency estimates a typical AI data center uses about as much electricity as 100,000 homes. One building. A hundred thousand homes. When a town argues about a data center, the water debate fits in a headline. The power debate is the one that shows up later, in grid upgrades and rate cases and a substation nobody budgeted for, long after the ribbon cutting photos fade.

    So no, the building is probably not going to drink your town dry, and yes, it is absolutely going to lean on your grid like it owns the place. Both things can be true. Around here, they usually are.

    What to ask before your town votes

    Ask for the permitted water draw, in gallons, in writing. Ask what kind of cooling it uses, and what it uses on the hottest week of the year, not the average week. Ask where the water comes from and what happens to it after. Ask what the power draw is and who pays for the upgrades when the grid needs them. And ask how many permanent jobs the building actually keeps once the construction crews leave, because that number has a way of shrinking between the announcement and the anniversary.

    None of that makes you anti-progress. It makes you a resident reading the fine print on a building that will outlive everybody on the council that approved it.

    The flat version

    A data center is not a vampire and it is not a toaster. Most of them drink about like an office building, a few drink like a small town, and every single one of them eats electricity like a city. The rumor about the bottle of water is a worst case dressed as an average. The real questions are local, they are in the permit, and they have numbers attached. Get the numbers before the vote, while getting them is still free.

    Related reading on Exit Desk:

    Sources:

    • GridSight, Community Questions (Google Keyword Planner data, refreshed November 1, 2026): “data center water usage” about 9,900 searches per month, up 654 percent year over year; “is it true that one AI prompt uses a bottle of water” about 8,100 searches per month: https://thegridsight.com/community-questions
    • JLARC, Data Centers in Virginia (December 2024): most data centers in Virginia use about as much water as a large office building, though a few use far more; a project’s water permit sets the ceiling.
    • Congressional Research Service, R49057: about 97 percent of US data center water is municipally supplied.
    • International Energy Agency: a typical AI data center uses as much electricity as 100,000 homes.
  • Too Small for a Lawyer, Too Big to Eat: Suing a Bad Contractor in NJ Small Claims Court

    Too Small for a Lawyer, Too Big to Eat: Suing a Bad Contractor in NJ Small Claims Court

    Here is the exact spot a lot of New Jersey homeowners end up. The contractor took your deposit, did half the job, or did the whole job like he was mad at your house. You are out a few thousand dollars. You call a lawyer, and the lawyer is kind about it, but the math does not work. The case is too small for a lawyer and too big for you to just eat it and smile.

    So you do nothing. And the contractor knows most people do nothing. That is the business model.

    Let me be clear about something, because this is the part the system does not advertise. New Jersey built a court for exactly this fight, it costs less to file than the deposit you lost, and if your contractor broke the consumer protection rules, the law does not just give you your money back. It can triple it.

    I am not a lawyer. (If I were a lawyer I would charge you to read this paragraph.) This is the map, not the legal advice. But it is a real map, pulled from the courts themselves.

    First, pick the right courtroom

    New Jersey splits money lawsuits by size, and the split decides where you file.

    $5,000 or less: Small Claims. Small Claims is a section of the Special Civil Part of Superior Court. It is built for people representing themselves. The New Jersey Courts’ own FAQ puts the limit plainly: small claims handles cases where you are suing for not more than $5,000.

    More than $5,000, up to $20,000: regular Special Civil Part. Same courthouse family, more formal. A $12,000 kitchen disaster lives here, not in small claims.

    More than $20,000: Law Division, Civil Part. That is full-size court, and that is lawyer territory.

    The filing fee for a small claims complaint is $35 for one defendant, plus $5 for each additional defendant, with service fees on top of that. Thirty-five dollars. Most of us have spent more than that on a “quick” trip into a home improvement store that turned into three trips.

    You file in the county where the defendant lives or where the business is located. The court sells you nothing, gives you the forms, and the forms are also on njcourts.gov.

    Now the part that changes the math: the Consumer Fraud Act

    A bad job is a contract dispute. A dishonest job is something else, and New Jersey law treats it like something else.

    Under the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act, if a contractor used deception, fraud, or misrepresentation on you, or broke the home improvement rules that sit under that law, and you can show an actual loss caused by it, the court is required to award you three times your damages. Three times. On top of that, the court awards your reasonable attorney fees and costs. The statute is N.J.S.A. 56:8-19, and the word in it is “shall,” which is lawyer for “the judge does not get to shrug.”

    This is why some rules you might think are paperwork actually matter:

    • Home improvement contracts over $500 must be in writing, signed, with the required terms. No written contract is not a small slip. It is a violation.
    • A contractor who does home improvement work without being registered with the Division of Consumer Affairs is committing an unlawful practice under the same law. Registration is not optional decoration. It is the license plate on the whole operation.
    • The treble damages rule can push a case over the small claims limit fast. A $4,000 loss, tripled, is $12,000, and now you are in regular Special Civil Part whether you planned to be or not. Worth knowing before you file, not after.

    None of this means every sloppy job is fraud. A guy who is bad at tile is bad at tile. The Act is aimed at deception: the deposit that vanished, the materials you paid for that never existed, the start date that was a fairy tale. Know the difference, because the judge will.

    Before you file: the boring stuff that wins

    Courts do not run on being right. They run on paper. So gather the paper while you are still angry, because anger fades and receipts do not.

    Save the contract, every text, every email, every invoice, and every photo. Especially the photos. Take them now, not after you fix the problem, because once you fix it your evidence is under somebody else’s drywall. Write down the timeline while you remember it: when he started, when he stopped answering, what you paid and when. If you filed a complaint with Consumer Affairs first (and you should, it is free and it creates another record), keep that too.

    One more deadline people sleep on. Breach of contract claims in New Jersey generally carry a six-year statute of limitations. Six years sounds like forever until you realize how fast a “next week, I swear” can eat a calendar. Do not let a guy string you along past your own rights.

    The flat truth at the end

    Winning a judgment and collecting a judgment are two different sports. The court can hand you a piece of paper that says he owes you, and collecting is its own process after that. I am not going to pretend otherwise, because pretending is what got you a half-finished bathroom in the first place.

    But here is what filing does even before you collect a dime. It makes you a record. It makes him answer, in a building, on a day, in front of a judge. For a lot of contractors, that letter from the court is the first time ignoring you stops being free.

    You already paid for the lesson once. The filing fee is $35. Learn it the cheap way this time.

    Related reading on Exit Desk:

  • Where Is My ANCHOR Money? How to Check Your NJ Payment Status

    Where Is My ANCHOR Money? How to Check Your NJ Payment Status

    Nobody in New Jersey is Googling the ANCHOR program because they love paperwork. They are Googling it because money was supposed to show up and it has not, or it showed up wrong, or their neighbor got a check three weeks ago and they are standing at their own mailbox like it owes them an apology. (It might. That is the whole point of this post.)

    ANCHOR is the state’s property tax relief program, Affordable New Jersey Communities for Homeowners and Renters, run by the Division of Taxation. The benefit being paid right now is the 2025 benefit, judged on where you lived and what you earned in 2025. Here is the answer up front: there is an official way to see exactly where your money stands, and it takes about two minutes.

    Check your status before you check your mailbox

    Go to propertytaxreliefstatus.nj.gov. That is the Division of Taxation’s online status page for the 2025 benefit. You type in your Social Security number or ITIN, then the ZIP code of the property. What comes back is your current filing status or your payment date. That is the whole trick. No account to create, no fee, no cousin with a website.

    Two things trip people up. First, use the ZIP of the property on the application. If you moved since, that is not the ZIP of wherever you are sitting now. Second, that tool is for the 2025 benefit only. If you are chasing an earlier year, the Division keeps a separate lookup for previous years, linked from the main ANCHOR page at nj.gov/treasury/taxation/anchor. Different years, different drawers.

    And type the address in yourself. Do not go hunting for your money through a link somebody texted you. If a message has to scare you into clicking it, it is not the State of New Jersey.

    When the money actually goes out

    There is no ANCHOR day. Nobody is handing out checks at the municipal building. Payments go out on a rolling basis. According to the Division, payments began September 15, and most applicants get paid within about 90 days of filing, unless the state needs more information from them first.

    The order matters too. People who filed the PAS-1, the combined application that seniors and people receiving Social Security or Railroad Retirement disability benefits use, began receiving payments on September 15, 2026. People the state filed for automatically began receiving theirs on October 1, rolling from there. So if your neighbor got paid in September and you are still waiting in November, that does not mean something is broken. It might just mean you were in a later group, in a longer line.

    How you filed decides how you get paid. Paper applicants get a paper check, period. Online applicants could choose a paper check or direct deposit. Neither one fixes your patience. Pick the mailbox or the bank account and let the line move.

    If yours is missing, wrong, or just weird

    Start with the status tool. Always. If it shows you a payment date, the money is real and it is moving, and your only job is to wait like an adult, which I am told is a learnable skill.

    If the tool shows nothing for you, there are two honest possibilities. Your application is still working through the system. Or you were never filed at all. The state automatically enrolled a lot of people based on last year’s application, including homeowners under 65 who do not receive Social Security or Railroad Retirement disability benefits, and renters of all ages. But here is the quiet part: if you qualified and you never received an ANCHOR Benefit Confirmation Letter, you were supposed to file an application yourself by the deadline. Automatic covered a lot of people. It did not cover everybody. “The state probably handled it” is not a filing status.

    If the amount looks wrong, check the math before you make the phone call. Homeowners get $1,500 if their 2025 New Jersey gross income was $150,000 or less, and $1,000 if it was between $150,001 and $250,000. That income number is line 29 of your 2025 NJ-1040, not your federal return, and not what you feel like you earned. Renters get $450 if they were 64 or younger, and $700 if they were 65 or older by December 31, 2025. And one wrinkle that explains a lot of small checks: the total of all your property tax relief benefits combined cannot be more than the property taxes paid on your main home for that year. If your ANCHOR came in under the chart, that cap is a likely reason.

    If a check arrived damaged, misspelled, or made out in a way your bank will not touch, do not just throw it in a drawer with the other mail you are avoiding. (We all have the drawer.) The Division says to mail it back with a written explanation and a request to resend it, to the New Jersey Division of Taxation, PO Box 266, Trenton, NJ 08695-0266. Slow. Official. Works.

    Still stuck, the Property Tax Relief Hotline is 1-888-238-1233 and the ANCHOR email is nj.anchor@treas.nj.gov. Expect a wait during payment season. Everybody else in the state has the same question you do.

    Who this cycle was for, in plain terms

    Quick version, since the window is already shut and this is mostly about checking your own result. Homeowners qualified if they owned and occupied their main home in New Jersey on October 1, 2025, with 2025 New Jersey gross income of $250,000 or less. Renters qualified at $150,000 or less, in a home subject to property taxes. Seniors and disability benefit recipients filed the combined PAS-1. Everybody else filed the ANC-1 or got filed automatically.

    The filing deadline for this cycle was November 2, 2026. It has passed. I am not going to dress that up, there is no late line for the 2025 benefit. As of this writing, the Division has not posted dates or amounts for the next cycle. When it does, the people who file early get paid early.

    The flat version

    The state owes a lot of people money and pays it out slowly, in waves, on purpose. Your benefit is filed, processing, dated, paid, or never filed at all, and the status tool will tell you which one in about two minutes. Check the tool before you check the mailbox. Check it before you sit on hold. And if it gives you an answer you do not like, at least now you know which problem you have.

    Related reading on Exit Desk:

  • VA Disability COLA Explained: How the Annual Increase Works (and What 2027 Brings)

    Every October, millions of veterans watch a single number. This year it is 3.6%: the cost-of-living adjustment coming to VA disability compensation for 2027, the largest annual raise since 2023. For a veteran rated at 100% with no dependents, that means about $141.79 more each month, or roughly $1,700 across the year.

    But the number on the announcement is only half the story. How the increase is calculated, when it actually reaches your bank account, what it does and does not change, and the scam calls that follow it every year, all matter just as much. Here is the complete picture.

    The short version

    • The 2027 COLA is 3.6%, announced by the Social Security Administration on October 14, 2026.
    • It is the biggest increase since the 8.7% adjustment in 2023, and up from 2.8% in 2026.
    • Congress still has to pass the annual authorizing act before VA checks change. As of mid-October, the 2026 bill had not cleared committee, though these bills routinely pass late in the year.
    • The increase is automatic. You do not need to apply, call the VA, or verify anything.

    How the COLA is actually calculated

    VA disability pay does not rise because Congress debates it each fall. Federal law (38 USC Section 5312) ties VA compensation to the exact same cost-of-living adjustment the Social Security Administration applies to Social Security benefits. The VA cannot pay a smaller COLA than Social Security, and each year Congress passes a Veterans' Compensation Cost-of-Living Adjustment Act to formally authorize it. Last year's became Public Law 119-42 on November 25, 2025.

    The percentage itself comes from the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), which tracks prices for a fixed basket of everyday goods and services. The math is simple: the government compares the average CPI-W for July, August, and September (the third quarter) of the current year against the same three months of the prior year. The percentage difference, rounded to the nearest tenth, becomes the COLA.

    If prices rose 3.6%, the COLA is 3.6%. If prices fall or stay flat, there is no COLA at all, and rates stay exactly where they are. Benefits never decrease.

    What 2027 pays, by rating

    These are the projected 2027 monthly rates for a veteran with no dependents, based on the confirmed 3.6% adjustment:

    Rating 2027 monthly pay Monthly increase
    10% $186.92 +$6.50
    20% $369.50 +$12.84
    30% $572.36 +$19.89
    40% $824.49 +$28.65
    50% $1,173.68 +$40.78
    60% $1,486.68 +$51.66
    70% $1,873.55 +$65.10
    80% $2,177.83 +$75.68
    90% $2,447.34 +$85.04
    100% $4,080.37 +$141.79

    Dependents add more, but only once your combined rating reaches 30%. At 10% and 20%, the VA pays a single flat amount regardless of household size. From 30% upward, you receive additional compensation for a spouse, children under 18, children 18 to 23 in a qualifying school program, and dependent parents. A veteran rated 100% with a spouse is projected at $4,307.87 a month in 2027; with a spouse and one child, $4,474.47. Dependents must be added to your award with VA Form 21-686c before any of it is paid.

    The increase reaches beyond basic compensation. Dependency and Indemnity Compensation (DIC) for surviving spouses rises about $61.18 a month, and Special Monthly Compensation rates climb by the same 3.6%.

    When the money hits your account

    The 2027 rates take effect December 1, 2026. VA compensation is paid in arrears, meaning December's compensation is paid at the start of January. Because January 1 is a federal holiday, the first payment at the new rate is expected on December 31, 2026.

    You do not need to do anything. The increase applies automatically to every eligible award. If your payment does not reflect the new rate in January, that is the time to contact the VA, not before.

    What the COLA does not do

    A few things veterans often misunderstand:

    • It does not change your rating. A veteran rated 70% does not move to a higher percentage because of COLA. Only the dollar amount attached to the existing rating moves.
    • A 0% rating still pays $0. The COLA is a percentage of your current payment, and 3.6% of nothing is nothing.
    • It cannot make your check smaller. If inflation ever runs negative, the COLA is simply zero for that year.

    A decade of COLAs, at a glance

    Year COLA
    2020 1.6%
    2021 1.3%
    2022 5.9%
    2023 8.7% (largest in about four decades)
    2024 3.2%
    2025 2.5%
    2026 2.8%
    2027 3.6%

    The 2023 spike reflected post-pandemic inflation; the years since have settled back into the low single digits veterans saw for most of the 2010s.

    It covers more than disability pay

    The annual adjustment applies across virtually every VA benefit program: standard disability compensation, Total Disability Individual Unemployability (TDIU), Special Monthly Compensation including SMC-K, DIC for survivors, VA pension, and even the annual clothing allowance. One percentage, applied everywhere, automatically.

    Watch for COLA scams

    Every year, the announcement brings a wave of scam calls. The VA will never call you to confirm your disability rating, banking information, or Social Security number in order to deliver the increase. There is nothing to verify and no form to rush. If someone calls claiming you need to confirm details to receive your raise, hang up and report it to the VA at 800-827-1000.

    Sources

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  • Phishing Emails Are Now Targeting AI Assistants Alongside People

    A phishing email can now target two readers at once: the person opening the message and the AI assistant summarizing their inbox. Barracuda Research says it identified emails containing conventional phishing lures alongside hidden instructions intended to manipulate AI tools.

    How the double attack works

    The visible portion may look like a routine internal message, invoice or document request. But the underlying email code may contain instructions hidden in HTML comments, invisible text, encoded strings or zero-width characters. The instructions attempt to convince an AI summarizer that the message is urgent or trustworthy, or to introduce a fraudulent task such as changing a vendor’s payment details.

    Why it matters

    Businesses increasingly use assistants to summarize mail, triage requests and prepare action lists. That creates a potential second route for attackers even when the human recipient ignores a suspicious attachment. Researchers describe attempted manipulation, not proof that every illustrated bank-transfer scenario resulted in real losses.

    How to reduce the risk

    • Independently confirm changes to payment instructions using a trusted contact method.
    • Require human authorization for financial transfers and sensitive account changes.
    • Treat email content, including hidden markup, as untrusted data rather than instructions for AI assistants.
    • Use layered filtering, prompt-injection defenses, monitoring and output checks.

    Sources: Barracuda Research; Malwarebytes.

  • New Jersey Cash Rounding Rules: What Happens When a Store Has No Pennies

    By EXIT DESK
    Published: September 22, 2026 at 8:11 p.m. ET
    Updated: September 22, 2026 at 10:05 p.m. ET

    New Jersey businesses may round cash transactions to the nearest nickel when penny supplies make exact change difficult, but the practice is optional and must be clearly disclosed before a customer incurs the charge.

    When a store can round

    State guidance says rounding should be applied only to the final transaction total, after taxes and fees have been added, and only when payment is made in cash. Businesses are not required to adopt rounding.

    Card and other non-cash transactions are not covered by the cash-rounding guidance.

    Sales tax does not get rounded

    New Jersey says sellers must calculate and remit sales tax based on the actual purchase price regardless of the cash ultimately exchanged. The state’s example uses a taxable item priced at $39.99: tax remains based on $39.99 even if the final cash total is rounded.

    Businesses still need exact accounting

    For state business taxes, an amount gained by rounding up is treated as additional income, while an amount lost by rounding down reduces gross receipts or total income. In other words, the cash drawer can round while the books still account for the exact transaction.

    What shoppers should look for

    If a store uses rounding, look for a clear notice before checkout and make sure the adjustment is being made to the final cash total rather than individual prices or the sales-tax calculation.

    Official source

    New Jersey Division of Taxation, “Cash Transaction Rounding Guidance Due to Penny Supply Changes,” updated Jan. 9, 2026.

  • New Jersey Junk Fees: Your Rights and How to File a Consumer Complaint

    New Jersey Junk Fees: Your Rights and How to File a Consumer Complaint

    By EXIT DESK
    Published: September 22, 2026 at 6:57 p.m. ET
    Updated: September 22, 2026

    A price that grows at checkout because of hidden, mandatory or misleading add-on charges may violate New Jersey consumer-protection law. In June 2026, the New Jersey Attorney General and Division of Consumer Affairs issued an enforcement statement explaining how the Consumer Fraud Act can apply to junk fees and encouraged consumers to report them.

    Not every separate fee is illegal. The key questions include whether a charge was mandatory, how and when it was disclosed, whether its purpose was accurately described and whether the advertised price gave consumers a misleading impression of the amount they would actually have to pay.

    Practices New Jersey regulators specifically flagged

    • Advertising a price that excludes mandatory fees and adding them later in the purchase process.
    • Hiding costs in fine print or using websites and apps designed to make charges difficult to spot.
    • Misrepresenting the purpose of a fee or whether it is mandatory.
    • Using vague or obscure labels for overpriced or unnecessary fees that provide little or no benefit.

    Save the entire pricing trail

    If you believe a fee was deceptive, save screenshots showing the original advertised price and each checkout step, along with receipts, contracts, invoices, confirmation emails and correspondence with the business. The timing of the disclosure can be as important as the amount of the charge.

    How to report a junk fee

    New Jersey’s Division of Consumer Affairs has created a “Fight the Fees” resource for consumers to report junk-fee experiences. A useful complaint should identify the business, advertised price, disputed fee, when the fee appeared, whether it was mandatory and what happened when you asked the business to correct it.

    A government complaint does not guarantee an individual refund. Consumers who paid by credit card can separately ask their issuer about applicable billing-dispute procedures and deadlines. Larger losses or disputes involving legal deadlines may warrant advice from a qualified attorney.

    New Jersey’s broader 2026 crackdown

    On June 15, Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed Executive Order 19 directing executive-branch agencies to assess junk fees in the industries they regulate and recommend possible rules, all-in pricing requirements or other measures. The order required agency reports to the Governor’s Office by Sept. 14.

    The Attorney General’s enforcement statement is separate from that review and puts businesses on notice that existing provisions of the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act may already apply to deceptive fee practices.

    Sources

    This article provides general consumer information, not legal advice.

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