Christine Benz
Christine Benz focuses on how ordinary investors can build and spend their money in retirement with clear, practical guidance that reflects real family lives rather than abstract models. As director of personal finance and retirement planning at Morningstar, she blends long-tenured investment expertise with a steady stream of consumer-facing articles, video series, and interviews on retirement, portfolios, and personal finance decisions. She also writes and speaks as an author and podcast host, using books, curated reading lists, and long-form conversations with experts to connect academic research and industry practice with everyday financial choices.
Retirement Planning for Real Life
Benz’s defining thread is retirement planning that starts with a person’s family situation and responsibilities rather than a one-size-fits-all formula. In the “Retirement Planning for Real Life” series, she organizes guidance around seven distinct groups, including single people, widows and widowers, couples without children, couples with an age gap, one‑income couples, parents who became parents later in life, and parents raising a child with a disability. Each episode lays out practical steps tailored to those circumstances, such as strengthening emergency funds, creating special‑needs trusts, and planning for long‑term‑care needs. Related pieces on losing a spouse and entering retirement extend that focus, addressing how spending, Social Security claiming, and lifestyle choices shift as households change.
Her work returns often to caregiving and aging, treating them as central financial events rather than side issues. Recent articles discuss helping with parents’ finances and urge readers to think carefully before joining a parent’s bank account, highlighting legal and practical risks beyond simple convenience. She writes about situations where a parent refuses to move and the adult child may have to accept that the parent will “fail at home,” tying emotional realities of aging directly to financial planning decisions.
In a profile of Elliott Appel, who cared for his father for seven years, she surfaces the way prolonged caregiving can derail a caregiver’s own financial and personal life, using narrative reporting to show where standard retirement assumptions break down.
Your Retirement Countdown
Benz also structures retirement planning as a timeline, showing how priorities evolve as retirement draws closer. In the “Your Retirement Countdown” video miniseries, she divides the journey into four stages: about 25 years out, 10 years out, three to five years out, and one year or less from retirement. For each stage she identifies core tasks, from building savings and investment discipline in the distant phase to tightening budgets, stress‑testing plans, and finalizing withdrawal strategies in the years just before retirement.
Articles such as “5 Things to Do Now to Retire in 3 to 5 Years” and “Tips for Entering Retirement” sit within the same framework, turning broad goals into checklists and specific actions for preretirees and new retirees.
Her coverage in this area mixes explanatory pieces with series packaging, often linking back to her book “How to Retire: 20 Lessons for a Happy, Successful, and Wealthy Retirement” and its companion podcast. She interviews experts on topics like spending in retirement and the softer side of later life, such as the importance of relationships and purpose, and then distills those conversations into clear takeaways for savers and retirees. In one essay on her investment philosophy, she writes in the first person about the principles that shape her own portfolio decisions, using her own habits and mistakes to illustrate how even seasoned professionals grapple with implementation.
Retirement Shocks
A second major strand in Benz’s work is the study of “retirement shocks” and how to build plans resilient enough to withstand them. In “What If Retirees Don’t Get the Returns They Were Hoping for?” she examines sequence‑of‑returns risk, unexpected early retirement, long‑term‑care costs, and inflation as threats that can undermine a retiree’s ability to sustain spending. She discusses research and panel insights on these topics and then translates them into strategies, such as moderating withdrawal rates, planning for healthcare expenses, and incorporating flexibility into spending rules.
Her reporting on “The State of Retirement Income UK 2026” and related videos on making money last in retirement extend this work to different markets, linking portfolio withdrawal assumptions with inflation and market volatility.
Tax‑aware drawdown planning features prominently in her coverage of retirement shocks. She regularly interviews tax expert Ed Slott on topics like qualified charitable distributions, the timing of Roth IRA conversions, and common required minimum distribution mistakes that can inflate retirees’ tax bills. These pieces combine technical detail with concrete scenarios, showing how retirees can use low‑tax years to reposition assets, meet RMDs efficiently, and support charitable goals without compromising long‑term sustainability.
The emphasis is less on product promotion and more on sequencing decisions - when to convert, when to withdraw, and how to coordinate accounts - to manage both risk and taxes over a long retirement.
5 Investments You Don’t Really Need
Benz’s investing coverage stresses simplicity and clarity, especially around portfolio construction for savers and retirees.
In “5 Investments You Don’t Really Need,” she argues that more holdings do not automatically mean better diversification and identifies categories that add complexity without improving outcomes, while pointing investors toward core building blocks. Her piece “Our Best Investment Portfolio Examples for Savers and Retirees” provides model portfolios linked to different goals and stages of life, illustrating how allocation, risk level, and account type can be matched to a household’s situation.
She draws on her long history at Morningstar covering mutual funds and leading fund research to keep the focus on structure and strategy rather than short‑term performance.
She also writes candidly about her own shortcomings as an investor in columns like “Do as I Say (Not as I Do),” which outlines mistakes and biases she has faced in her personal portfolio. In “I Thought I Had These 3 Retirement Topics Figured Out. Here’s Why I Changed My Mind,” she revisits earlier views on target‑date funds, TIPS funds, and seeking professional help, explaining why new evidence or experience led her to adjust her stance. Alongside these self‑critical pieces, she curates and reviews retirement and investing books she recommends, drawing on interviews from “The Long View” podcast and other conversations to guide readers toward deeper resources. Across this body of work, Benz distinguishes herself by combining model portfolios, tax and withdrawal strategy, and personal reflection, always anchored in the practical needs of retirees and near‑retirees rather than abstract investing theory.
4 more finance journalists.
Abigail Summerville
Abigail Summerville brings a leveraged finance background to her work covering consumer and retail mergers and acquisitions for Reuters. She reports on deal-making and capital markets across food, beverages, spirits, personal care, skincare, bath products and pet food. Her stories focus on transaction terms, ownership stakes, valuation, debt structures and funding sources. She often breaks news on potential sales and strategic reviews before formal announcements. Notable coverage includes Sazerac’s acquisition of Au Vodka, Blackstone’s exploration of a ZO Skin Health sale, CVC’s efforts to sell the parent of Dr Teal’s, and Colgate-Palmolive’s planned divestitures. She also covers consumer IPOs, including Jersey Mike’s and Black Rock Coffee, and co-writes Wall Street market reports. She joined Reuters in 2022 after three years covering leveraged finance and primary debt markets.
Adekunle Agbetiloye
Adekunle Agbetiloye is a senior reporter who connects capital flows, hard numbers and energy transition to the wider African economy. He works at Business Insider Africa, covering how money, technology and energy reshape economic growth, jobs and living conditions. His beat spans the African economy, technology, energy transition, climate change, startups and critical minerals, with a focus on concrete deals and data-led stories. He reports on African startup funding cycles, sovereign wealth funds, billionaire investors, multilateral and private investment programs, energy and power markets, Bitcoin mining, and economic policy choices. His work follows how governments finance spending, manage debt and respond to social pressure, and how sector snapshots and health and development metrics reveal links between macro indicators, corporate strategy and everyday costs.
Aimee Picchi
Aimee Picchi connects Social Security, retirement programs and economic policy directly to the financial security of ordinary Americans, showing how macro decisions hit household budgets. She is associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch at CBS News, covering business and personal finance with clear, accessible explanations of complex money issues. Her core beat is Social Security and retirement, interest rates and inflation, and how policy, markets and company strategies affect workers, retirees, savers and investors. She reports on benefit adequacy, looming Social Security cuts, COLA changes, Federal Reserve rate decisions, fuel costs, trade tensions and labor’s share of income, always framing coverage around pocketbook impacts. Her background includes retirement reporting fellowships, prior staff reporting on technology, media and business, an Institutional Investor book on affluent investors, and freelance work for national outlets. She also writes science fiction and fantasy and is a Nebula Award finalist.
Alex Harring
Alex Harring turns fast-moving market, economic and corporate developments into clear pre-market briefings that show what will matter when U.S. trading opens. He is a markets and economics reporter for CNBC’s digital platforms and writes Morning Squawk, a flagship daily newsletter that gives readers five key things to know before the stock market opens. His beat spans financial markets, investing, consumer trends and the U.S. economy, with coverage of central bank decisions, inflation, corporate strategy, sector moves and geopolitical shocks. He focuses on how policy, data and earnings shape equities, interest rates, currencies and investor positioning, linking price action with underlying drivers in real time and in reported features. Harring’s background reporting on corporate news, business and the economy across print, digital, broadcast and streaming informs his habit of connecting markets, companies and geopolitics in one frame.