Alina Khan

Alina Khan is The i Paper's Money Coach Reporter, covering personal finance with a focus on pensions and retirement, and using individual readers’ stories to explain how policy and products affect their lives.

Inheritance tax on pensions and retirement plans

Her Money Coach work centres on the practical problems people face as they move into or through retirement, often framed around a single reader’s dilemma. In a column about a 71-year-old whose retirement plans were derailed by inheritance tax on pensions, she uses the case to unpack how changing rules on pension death benefits can disrupt long‑laid financial plans and to set out the choices available to someone in that position. She writes regularly on retirement pensions, taking readers through questions about drawing income, passing on pension wealth, and the tension between tax efficiency and security. Across these pieces she keeps explanations rooted in the specifics of each scenario, helping readers connect technical rules to their own circumstances rather than treating pensions as an abstract policy topic.

Her reporting extends to state pension issues, including cases where government rules leave some retirees with frozen or reduced entitlements, and she actively seeks out people affected by these policies to build evidence‑based, human‑led coverage. She treats pension and retirement stories as both financial and emotional turning points, reflecting how decisions about tax, inheritance and longevity feed directly into people’s sense of stability and their plans for family support.

Opting out of pensions and fearing for retirements

Khan devotes significant attention to how younger workers engage with pensions and long‑term saving, often writing from her own vantage point in her mid‑twenties. In “I’m 25 and more people my age are opting out of pensions. I fear for their retirements”, she explores why under‑30s are leaving auto‑enrolment schemes despite the default 5 per cent employee contribution and 3 per cent from employers, and explains the long‑term impact of stepping away from workplace pensions. The piece combines plain‑spoken breakdowns of contribution rules with conversations about insecure work, high living costs and mistrust of financial institutions, positioning pension participation as part of a broader generational story rather than a narrow compliance issue.

She uses similar techniques in other generational features, such as an essay on being “abnormal for Gen Z” because she prioritises reading books over social media. These pieces show how she connects money behaviour with wider cultural habits, arguing implicitly that literacy, attention and long‑term thinking are linked to how people plan for their futures. For sources with stories touching on younger adults, long‑term saving and the trade‑offs between present pressures and future security, her work shows an interest in both the numerical and the social dimensions of the problem.

Should retail investors be given access to LTAFs?

Before joining The i Paper, Khan worked as a Senior Reporter at FTAdviser, giving her a background in the professional financial advice and investment industry. She has also written for Portfolio Adviser, where her coverage includes product‑focused news such as Quilter Cheviot’s model portfolio service becoming available on three additional platforms and analytical pieces asking whether retail investors should be given access to long‑term asset funds. In these articles she reports on discretionary fund management, platform distribution and the regulatory framework around newer investment vehicles, reflecting a familiarity with technical detail and industry jargon.

This trade‑press experience feeds into her consumer work by grounding her Money Coach pieces in an understanding of how advisers, asset managers and platforms operate. When she explains pension options, investment choices or tax rules to readers, she does so with an eye to how these products are built and sold, and to the regulatory constraints that define what ordinary investors can and cannot do. That mix distinguishes her coverage from more generic personal finance reporting that focuses only on surface‑level tips without reference to the underlying market structure.

Reading, teenage magazines and life stories

Alongside finance, Khan writes features that explore culture, memory and the way advice and expectations have changed over time. In a piece about spending seven days reading a 1960s magazine for teenage girls, she mines an archive of old issues to show how past guidance on relationships, appearance and behaviour contrasts with contemporary attitudes, using the material to illuminate how young women were spoken to in mid‑twentieth‑century Britain. Her essay on reading habits within Gen Z similarly uses personal experience to comment on attention, empathy and the value of books in an age of constant digital distraction.

She has also worked on first‑person and life‑story features, including a narrative about the death of a younger brother and the unreal quality of grief, and a piece on actor Amanda Barrie’s decision to move back to London later in life. These articles show her capacity to shape intimate, reflective stories that sit at the intersection of personal change and wider social context. Taken together with her Money Coach reporting, they mark her out as a journalist who is comfortable moving between numbers and narrative, using both to explain how financial and life decisions land in the real world.