Nina Hendy

Nina Hendy brings a people-first lens to business and finance, using individual stories and clear explanations to show how economic shifts, money rules and workplace decisions land in everyday lives. She is a freelance business and finance journalist who writes regularly for The Age and other major outlets, covering personal finance, cost-of-living pressures, small business and careers. Her work stands out for blending human case studies with practical, service-style detail across topics such as redundancies, renting, superannuation and the financial choices facing households and small firms.

Redundancies and the human cost of workplace change

Hendy’s coverage of the labour market often starts with a single worker and uses their experience to explore broader patterns in restructuring and job loss. In her story on Natalie’s “gut-wrenching” redundancy, framed as a situation that is becoming more common, she anchors the piece in one person’s shock and dislocation, then situates that story within a wider trend of workplace cuts and economic uncertainty. Across this strand of her work, she focuses on the emotional and financial toll of redundancy, the speed with which stable roles can vanish, and the way changes in business conditions flow through to mortgage payments, savings plans and family budgets.

Rather than treating job losses as abstract numbers, she looks at how workers rebuild careers and income, what support they do or do not receive, and how corporate decisions interact with structural forces like interest rates and slowing sectors. Her earlier career-focused writing for The Age, including pieces encouraging readers to make particular years the moment they “fulfil your potential” and “realise your career dreams”, shows a long-running interest in how people shape working lives through both choice and necessity. Taken together, these stories mark out a consistent preoccupation with how macroeconomic shifts are experienced one worker at a time.

Cost-of-living, renting and housing pressure

A major thread in Hendy’s reporting is the squeeze on housing and everyday expenses, especially for renters and younger adults. On The Age’s renting and housing pages, her byline appears on stories about innovative responses to the housing crisis, such as Talika Thomas’s creation of SheShare, described as Australia’s first women-only flatmate platform built from her Melbourne living room. That piece reflects her interest in both the structural problem — a tight rental market and a wider housing crisis — and the grassroots solutions emerging from people directly affected.

She also writes about the growing cohort of adults still living with their parents, highlighting that the percentage of men in their late 20s living at home has risen sharply over the past two decades. In this kind of work, she treats housing as a social, financial and intergenerational issue rather than simply a property-market story, bringing in themes of independence, delayed milestones and the trade-offs families make to manage rising costs. These housing and cost-of-living pieces sit alongside broader coverage of property, wealth and expense management flagged on her professional site, where she lists property, finance and wealth, cost of living and ESG among her core beats.

Personal finance, superannuation and retirement

Hendy writes extensively on personal finance, with a particular focus on superannuation, building wealth and planning for retirement. As a personal finance contributor, she regularly covers superannuation rules, investing and wealth-building strategies for mainstream audiences, positioning her work as guidance for readers who want to understand how policy changes and product choices affect their long-term savings. Her description as a small business and finance journalist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald is matched by articles that explain practical money decisions and their consequences.

In one prominent money piece, she explains reforms that require employers to pay superannuation at the same time as wages, describing this as one of the most beneficial changes for Australian workers in decades and setting out how concurrent payments improve retirement outcomes by letting super balances compound earlier. She also reports on the challenges older Australians face as they approach or enter retirement, including tax and financial pitfalls that can erode savings, in work that is syndicated across regional mastheads. Beyond traditional products, she has examined the risks of influencers giving financial advice, warning readers through a story on a high-profile American figure that unregulated guidance can have serious consequences for investors. Across these pieces, her hallmark is translating technical money topics into accessible language, while grounding them in real households’ dilemmas and regulatory context.

Small business, entrepreneurship and professional services

Small business is another core pillar of Hendy’s portfolio. She is described as a small business and finance journalist for major Australian mastheads and also writes regularly for business platforms aimed at owners and operators. Her own site emphasises that she covers business and finance with a particular interest in property, wealth, cost of living and superannuation, signalling a focus on how business decisions intersect with personal money outcomes. For corporate and SME audiences, she produces articles on topics such as cash flow, growth, and navigating a challenging economic environment, helping business owners understand the levers they can pull to stay resilient.

Her reporting has also included interviews with professional services and intellectual property specialists about how businesses can protect their ideas and minimise risk, such as a conversation with an IP firm chairman about the protections companies should put in place. This strand of her work connects legal and regulatory detail with practical implications for founders and executives. By moving between small-business case studies, expert commentary and actionable takeaways, she positions her business coverage as both narrative and guidance, rather than market commentary alone.

Cross-masthead freelance reporting and tone

Hendy operates as a freelance journalist across multiple titles, contributing business and finance coverage to The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, Forbes Advisor Australia and other national and regional outlets. This cross-masthead work allows her to write for both metropolitan broadsheets and niche business audiences, and to switch between consumer-focused personal finance stories and more specialist small-business or professional insights. She has been publishing business and finance stories for The Age for more than a decade, from early career and self-improvement pieces through to current coverage of housing, money and work.

Across these different platforms, her tone is straightforward and pragmatic, with an emphasis on clarity and real-life stakes. Whether she is unpacking new super rules, profiling an entrepreneur solving a rental problem from a living room, or charting the rise in young adults living at home, she consistently keeps individual experiences at the centre of stories about money, business and policy. That combination of human storytelling with clear, actionable detail is what marks her out from more generic coverage of the business beat.