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When Ron Lieber arrived at The Wall Street Journal offices for a job interview in 2002, a number of editors immediately answered him.
“They said, ‘We know what your shot is: beat the system,’” said Mr. Lieber, who had most recently worked as a senior writer for Fast Company covering management, design and careers. “And now you come over here and do that for us.”
After co-founding The Wall Street Journal’s Personal Journal section and writing a separate column on money management, he was hired by The New York Times in 2008 to take over Your Money, a personal finance column. Sixteen years later, he’s built a reputation for giving readers advice — often colored by his own experience — on headache-inducing issues, like how to navigate the maze of paying for college or preparing for life after a layoff.
“I enjoy introducing readers to characters who they might not think would be the subject of money columns, but who are actually perfect for teaching us a thing or two about how the world works,” said Mr. Lieber, whose column appears online and most Saturdays in the Business section.
As a columnist for The Times, he has witnessed two recessions and a pandemic. (In 2009, he even wrote about how his own financial planner was accused of fraud.) In a recent conversation, he shared the unexpected lessons he learned writing the column and the topics he thought would soon hit the world of personal finance would come to dominate. . These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
How did you first become interested in finance?
When I was in high school in Chicago and applying for financial aid for college, I found my way to Roger Koester, associate director of financial aid at Northwestern University. He had an after-hours gig in his office; in exchange for $45, he explained the entire financial aid system to local families trying to understand it. He knew exactly what he was talking about and gave me excellent advice.
It reminded us that there is always an adult somewhere who knows how to beat the system. If you can find that person and ask questions, you can help other people beat the system too. I don’t consider myself the adult, but every week I still feel like I’m looking for the adults who know the answer to whatever thorny consumer question is on our readers’ minds.
What makes a good column?
When I think about personal finance, there’s a sort of Venn diagram of possible topics: things that are very expensive; processes that are very complicated; and decisions where emotions can lead us astray if we are not careful. I like to think that if I’m in the middle of that diagram, I’ve found the right topic.
And then there is the matter of the voice. The best compliment anyone can give me is to say that my column sounded like I was in the room with them explaining the topic. I want it to feel conversational, not preachy, preachy, or didactic. That doesn’t mean it’s always friendly; I do my best to defeat institutions or entities that can handle it and deserve it.
If I can find the right topic and do it in the right voice, I’ve won the week.
Last month, an article from New York magazine’s financial advice columnist about how she got scammed out of $50,000 went viral. Do you think you would have fallen for that scam?
Never say never. I constantly tell myself that there is never a reason to do anything right now. There’s almost always time to call one, three, or five people who are smarter than you or just calmer than you, who will ask you level-headed questions and try to pull you back from the brink of making a big mistake.
Which writers and publications do you read to stay informed?
I read The Wall Street Journal religiously. I am a big fan of Ramit Sethi, the author of the book “I will teach you to be rich‘ and a newsletter writer. I love reading Michelle Singletary, who writes the personal finance column for The Washington Post. And I also really like the attitude and the message of Tori Dunlapthat most people know from Instagram and TikTok.
What trends are you paying attention to?
All the people who have spent their entire careers in the workforce without a traditional pension are retiring, and many of them will run out of money. The question of what will happen if that happens is very worrying.
I’m also interested in all the work that Conor Dougherty and other Times colleagues have done around our inability to build more housing in a reasonable way. It is not clear where and how people in their twenties and even thirties will buy a house.
Would you like to add anything?
When people see things in the world that don’t make sense – or they think corruption needs to be exposed, or they just want to say, ‘I can’t be the only one who doesn’t understand this, will you explain?’ – it’s so helpful for me to know. Some of the work I’m most proud of started with a reader’s comment on one of my columns. We’re all in this together, and none of us are as smart as all of us.