Julie Jason
Julie Jason is a personal money manager and columnist whose work centers on retirement investing, investor protection and financial literacy, drawing on decades of experience in law and portfolio management to help individual investors build and preserve long-term wealth. She leads a fiduciary investment advisory boutique that serves high-net-worth clients, giving her an insider’s view of how portfolios are constructed and managed over full market cycles. Across her columns and books she writes in short, focused segments that translate complex rules and risks into practical decisions for individual savers, retirees and families.
The Discerning Investor
Jason’s flagship work is her award-winning syndicated column The Discerning Investor, published on UExpress and in a range of newspapers. The feature is positioned as a weekly investor-education column that offers clarity and insight on markets and personal finance while maintaining a healthy skepticism about products and promises made to retail investors. The column’s stated aim is to help readers assess investment risks and potential gains and to guide them toward building a more secure retirement nest egg.
Subject matter is broad but consistently grounded in personal finance decisions: she covers estate and tax laws, living wills, stocks and bonds, Social Security benefits, pensions, marriage and divorce, and real estate as they affect individual investors. Over more than a thousand uninterrupted weekly installments, she has maintained a steady focus on decisions that households face over a lifetime of earning, saving and drawing down assets.
The tone is direct and explanatory, with the legal framing and market detail kept in service of practical outcomes rather than commentary on daily market moves.
Retire without worry through planning
Jason’s archive shows a sustained focus on retirement planning as a long-term process rather than a single event. Early in her chronology she wrote on themes such as “Retire without worry through planning” and “How to withdraw when you retire,” framing retirement as something that must be engineered through disciplined strategy and thoughtful withdrawal policies.
More recent columns examine specific retirement challenges facing different cohorts, including “Gen Xers: Need a miracle to retire securely?” and “Family communication is key to legacy planning,” which address both financial and intergenerational aspects of retirement security.
In parallel, her coverage for other outlets emphasizes retirement portfolios and the rules that govern them, including required minimum distributions, the 10-year rule under SECURE Act changes, and strategies for turning unused 529 education accounts into Roth IRAs. She regularly breaks down Social Security and pension topics for individuals, with pieces such as “Wondering about spousal Social Security benefits?” and guidance on creditor protection when rolling a 401(k) into an IRA.
Across these pieces, her distinguishing trait is the way she ties statutory and regulatory details back to concrete portfolio decisions that determine whether a retirement plan works in practice.
Investor protection and financial literacy
Investor protection and financial literacy run through Jason’s work as defining priorities rather than occasional topics.
Her columns are described as focusing on investor protection and sound decision-making, and she is widely identified as a proponent of financial literacy education. She uses recurring themes to highlight where individual investors are exposed: “Scam tactics are shifting: Awareness is your protection” and coverage of changing fraud patterns show her emphasis on recognizing and resisting deceptive practices. Another column, “FINRA survey shows investors need more knowledge,” links regulatory findings to the everyday gaps in investor understanding that her writing is designed to close.
Beyond the page, she sponsors a 401(k) Champion award that promotes peer-to-peer mentorship among workplace savers, reinforcing her view that practical, shared experience is central to improving outcomes.
Her work also examines how different groups, including women, think about themselves as investors and how perception can influence risk-taking and preparedness, extending the protection theme into questions of identity and confidence. Across platforms, she writes for audiences of varying means, but the constant is an educational stance that assumes readers can make better decisions when rules, risks and opportunities are explained plainly.
Taxes, Social Security and retirement rules
Jason’s recent columns show a detailed, transaction-level focus on tax and benefit rules that affect retirement security.
In her chronology, she writes on issues such as “Is your tax refund not in the mail?” and “Close to 1 million people need to claim refunds before May 17,” highlighting missed opportunities and deadlines that directly affect household cash flows. She tracks IRS operational changes, with pieces on the expansion of electronic filing and on enforcement actions against taxpayers who failed to file, translating administrative developments into implications for individual filers. Her coverage of credits and incentives, including the Saver’s Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit, is framed around eligibility and how lower- and middle-income families can use these tools to bolster retirement savings or support current finances.
On the retirement side, she explains final regulations on required minimum distributions and clarifies the 10‑year rule, paying close attention to how new rules change withdrawal patterns and tax burdens over a retiree’s life. She also returns frequently to Social Security, not only in spousal benefit questions but in broader pieces on how inflation and savings rates interact with government programs and personal reserves. This combination of tax, benefit and regulatory coverage distinguishes her from generic market reporters by focusing on the rulebook that governs how ordinary investors actually accumulate and draw down money.
Across this body of work, Jason stands out as a columnist whose legal training, portfolio management experience and long-running investor education focus are consistently channeled into concrete guidance on retirement, protection and literacy, with each column built around a specific decision or risk rather than broad market commentary.
4 more finance journalists.
Abigail Summerville
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Adekunle Agbetiloye
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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.