Kerry Hannon
Kerry Hannon examines how work, money, and aging intersect, focusing on the pressures and choices that shape long-term financial security for workers and retirees. She is a senior columnist at Yahoo Finance and a workplace futurist who specializes in personal finance, retirement, careers, and entrepreneurship. Her coverage stands out for the way it connects policy changes, employer practices, and individual behavior into clear, practical narratives about financial resilience in midlife and beyond.
Retirement security and the strain behind the numbers
Hannon’s retirement coverage goes beyond account balances to the cracks underneath them. In her work on retirement savings hitting record highs while hardship withdrawals climb, she pairs headline figures from investment firms with the reality of workers raiding accounts to cover immediate cash shortfalls. She returns to this tension in reporting that one-third of investors carry more credit card debt than retirement savings, highlighting how high-interest borrowing directly competes with long-term investing.
Policy and benefits design are a recurring lens. Hannon writes on how Federal Reserve rate hikes ripple through retirees’ portfolios and income streams, translating monetary policy into concrete impacts on those drawing down savings. She tracks expected increases in the Social Security cost-of-living adjustment and the accompanying debates over program changes, showing how benefit formulas, inflation, and politics converge for older Americans depending on that check.
She also takes on retirement products, using interviews with figures such as Jean Chatzky to reassess annuities and explain when guaranteed income can help repair gaps in retirement security.
Debt that shadows retirement is another through-line. In coverage of student loans “quietly gutting” retirement, especially for people in their 40s, she explains how education borrowing delays saving, extends repayment into peak earning years, and compresses the time horizon for building a nest egg. Across these pieces, the constant is her focus on the trade-offs people make between present obligations and future security, and on the structural features - interest rates, program rules, plan design - that either widen or narrow those trade-offs.
Careers, pay, and the changing world of work
Hannon treats career decisions as financial decisions, especially for workers in midlife and later career. As a strategist on career transitions and the “new world of work,” she draws on more than three decades of reporting on business, entrepreneurship, personal finance, and retirement to frame job moves as levers for both income and longevity in the workforce.
Her books, including “Retirement Bites: A Gen X Guide to Securing Your Financial Future” and “In Control at 50+: How to Succeed in The New World of Work,” extend this focus, offering structured advice on navigating work and money through midlife transitions.
In her Yahoo Finance columns, she covers pay dynamics for job switchers in a low-hire job market, showing where workers can still command raises and how selective hiring reshapes bargaining power. She looks at the rise of flexible and remote work through the lens of “great pajama jobs” and midlife entrepreneurship, emphasizing paths that allow older workers to stay employed, build new income streams, and protect their health. Her career reporting frequently returns to the idea of work as a long-term asset - something to manage and adapt, rather than a static role.
Hannon’s earlier and concurrent work for major outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Money, U.S. News & World Report, USA Today, MarketWatch, PBS’s Next Avenue, and AARP publications extends this dual focus on jobs and money, reinforcing her position as a specialist in work-to-retirement transitions. Across platforms, she writes for readers navigating midlife choices about staying, switching, or starting over - and the financial implications attached to each path.
Generational pressures and caregiving burdens
Generational stress is a distinct strand in Hannon’s coverage. In work on caregiving for children and parents, she documents the financial “squeeze” kneecapping millennials who are supporting both kids and aging relatives while trying to save for their own futures. She shows how caregiving time, out-of-pocket costs, and fragmented support systems erode earning capacity and retirement preparedness for people in this “sandwich” position.
Her reporting on younger adults shows similar strains from different sources. Writing about Gen Z adults diverting money intended for retirement into sports betting, she surfaces how speculative behavior and easy access to wagering platforms cannibalize long-term saving. Combined with her student loan work, these pieces build a picture of generations carrying heavy financial burdens - education debt, caregiving, and volatile side bets - while facing the same expectation to fund their own retirements.
Hannon links these generational themes back to policy and workplace practice, arguing implicitly that design choices - around benefits, leave, and debt relief - either ease or intensify the load on working-age adults. This emphasis on how different cohorts experience the same financial systems is a key distinction in her beat.
Explainers built from data, expert voices, and lived experience
Hannon’s columns typically blend survey data, institutional research, and interviews with practitioners and authors to create accessible explainers on complex financial topics. Pieces on young investors using social media for investing advice, for example, use survey findings to show both the reach and the risks of informal online guidance, then layer in expert commentary on what disciplined investing looks like in that environment. Her profile of Morgan Housel’s view that spending money is an art uses a conversation with the author to explore behavioral finance themes in everyday terms.
Her voice is direct and practical. She translates central bank decisions, benefit formulas, and product structures into questions about how people actually live - whether they can stay in their homes, keep working as long as they need, and avoid draining retirement savings for emergencies. As a frequent TV, radio, and podcast commentator and a keynote speaker on retirement, jobs, career transitions, leadership, and personal finance, she carries this explanatory style across formats, reinforcing her role as an on-air expert for Yahoo Finance and beyond.
Taken together, Hannon’s body of work is defined by a consistent through-line: connecting the technical architecture of money - rates, benefits, products, debt - to the everyday decisions and pressures facing workers, caregivers, and retirees. That combination of retirement depth, career strategy, and generational insight is what distinguishes her coverage on the finance beat.
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Abigail Summerville
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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.