DENVER, CO – Today the Senate voted to approve the 2026 School Finance Act, sponsored by Senator Chris Kolker, D-Centennial.

“As Chair of the Senate Education Committee, upholding our promise to Colorado students, teachers, and schools is my number one priority,” said Kolker. “During an extremely challenging budget year, we worked hard to ensure we don’t backslide on the important progress we’ve made to eliminate the Budget Stabilization Factor and drive more funding to our schools. While there is much more work to do to ensure Colorado is a national leader in public education funding, I’m proud that despite budgetary constraints we were successfully able to increase per pupil funding and protect funding for Colorado’s public schools.”

Also sponsored by Senator Barb Kirkmeyer, R-Weld County, SB26-023 sets statewide per pupil funding at $12,316 for Fiscal Year 2026-2027, an increase of $440 as compared to FY 2025-2026 funding levels, bringing total K-12 funding for the upcoming fiscal year to $10.2 billion and increasing total program funding by $194.8 million. The General Fund contribution to K-12 education is increasing significantly thanks to the Kids Matter Fund created by Democrats last year, which is forecast to invest more than $216 million in Colorado’s schools next year. 

Under SB26-023, the new school finance formula (HB24-1448) is implemented at 30 percent and includes a three-year averaging model to help stabilize school funding in a declining enrollment environment. This follows requirements in last year’s School Finance Act that phased in the implementation of the new school funding formula at 15 percent per year for six years, and then 10 percent for the final seventh year of implementation.

This year, Democrats also increased funding by $14 million to continue free preschool access for all Colorado kids and increased funding by $38 million to implement the voter-approved Proposition MM to preserve access to free school meals for students.

SB26-023 now moves to the House for further consideration. Track its progress here.

Eddie Dilleen is one of Australia’s biggest residential landlords. He reckons he now has 200 properties in his portfolio.

But he just bought perhaps his favourite house yet. More than 25 years after his parents divorced and sold the family home for $97,000, he has purchased it back for a bit under $1 million.

“I just bought it sight unseen,” he told Yahoo Finance.

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Dilleen said he has spent the past decade periodically checking if the house had returned to market.

“You can set reminders and stuff like that, but when I was on my phone messing around, I would randomly check it literally every one or two weeks for the past 12 years.”

His parents first bought the home in the far western suburbs of Sydney in 1985 for $51,000. When he saw it listed, he felt “an overwhelming rush of excitement,” he said.

“This home holds some of my best memories… and some tough ones too. But today, it represents something completely different,” he wrote online, sharing a photo of himself next to the sold sign on Tuesday. “It’s proof that where you start doesn’t define where you finish.”

He ultimately bought it for 19 times what his parents paid for it 41 years ago.

“The affordable properties and suburbs, they usually grow at a higher percentage value. I’m all about percentages,” he told Yahoo Finance.

“Everyone talks about the best, blue chip locations, but I buy everywhere.”

Dilleen, who is in his mid 30s and also runs a buyers agency and writes books about real estate investing, estimates the properties he owns are now collectively worth about $150 million (he likes to buy blocks that contain multiple units) with about $60 million in debt against that.

According to ATO data, he is about one of 166 mega landlords who own 20 or more rental properties in their own name. Dilleen said he owns “about 30 or 40” in his own name, and others through trust and company structures.

Landlords overly reliant on negative gearing ‘will be wiped out’

With less than two weeks until the Labor government hand downs its promised “ambitious” budget, property investors are bracing for possible changes to the rules around tax deductions related to investments.

One of the most commonly used is negative gearing, which allows landlords to claim losses to reduce the amount of income tax they pay. But its days could be numbered with the federal government expected to cap, or possibly even scrap, the existing policy under certain circumstances. While no announcements have actually been made, most observers expect such a change to be grandfathered in for existing investors.

Dilleen says he “couldn’t care less” if the government does away with negative gearing because he tries to focus on purely “undervalued” assets that have good rental return, although he admits he takes advantage of it on some of his properties.

“Just some of my properties are negatively geared, but many of them are not,” he said.

“But it is a big thing for the average person that owns one or two properties.

“Average people, investors starting out that are just getting started buying properties, many of them rely on negative gearing, but that is a stupid strategy.”

Dilleen pointed to sections of the market, often inner city locations, where houses can cost $2-3 million but have relatively weak yield, or rental income, compared to the sale price.

“That’s stupid, because if they are negatively gearing like a $3 million house, and then you’re getting $1,000 a week renting it out, they’re going to be in big trouble. They’re silly investors … they’re relying on negative gearing and a lot of them will get wiped out,” he said.

According to the latest figures from the ATO, about half of all investment properties are negatively geared.

There are 1.1 million negatively geared property investors, out of a total of 2.26 million. In terms of total stock, of the 3.2 million property interests held by individual taxpayers, 1.59 million or 49.4 per cent are negatively geared.

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Financial services companies are “far ahead of regulators in adoption and deep adoption of AI,” said the report issued Tuesday (April 28) by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance.

“The scale and pace of AI adoption in financial services is genuinely remarkable – 4 in 5 firms are already deploying AI at some level, agentic systems have crossed into the mainstream and real productivity and profitability gains are being felt across the industry, although unevenly,” said Bryan Zhang, the center’s executive director.

As for regulators, 48% of the regulators surveyed said they were “still in the ‘exploring’ stage for AI adoption” or not engaged with AI at all.

The report found that software engineering is the “most mature” AI application in the financial sector and is a primary cyber risk transmission vector, with 48% of respondents flagging adversarial AI as a primary concern.

The center said this is underlined by Anthropic’s claim that its Mythos model is often more capable than humans when it comes to hacking, which makes manual oversight of AI use in financial services problematic, the center added.

Complicating matters is a “notable perception gap,” the report said. AI vendors put less emphasis than industry and regulators on adversarial AI threats, something mentioned by 50% of industry respondents and 57% of regulators, but only 35% of vendors.

The same held true for the issue of cyber/operational resilience: 32% of vendors mentioned it, compared to 46% for industry and 59% among regulators.

“These intersecting vulnerabilities can also feed into the top perceived risk across all stakeholders – data privacy and protection (73% of respondents) as sensitive data is typically the primary target for the cyber exploits these vulnerabilities enable,” the report added.

In related news, PYMNTS wrote Tuesday about increasing levels of AI adoption among retailers as AI agents play a greater role in commerce.

“Agentic artificial intelligence’s first real test in commerce may come not as a flashy shopping tool, but as a trust exercise that could decide who leads the next phase of digital payments growth,” the report said.

PYMNTS Intelligence research shows that 45% of consumers would be comfortable letting AI agents complete purchases on their behalf, while 43% of retailers are piloting autonomous AI.

The research found that 95% of consumers report at least one concern about agentic commerce, with half saying they would trust agentic commerce more if they knew fraud protections were in place.