Jane Pauley hosts CBS Sunday Morning's annual Money Issue on retirement and Social Security

Jane Pauley hosted an encore of CBS Sunday Morning’s annual Money Issue, a 90-minute broadcast that ran from 9:00 to 10:30 a.m. ET and put retirement and Social Security at the center of the program. The special has long used money as a way to examine the pressures of daily life, and this edition focused on the choices Americans face as they try to make later-life finances work.

CBS News Sunday Morning airs Sundays beginning at 9:00 a.m. ET and streams on the CBS News app beginning at 11:00 a.m. ET, extending a franchise that has repeatedly returned to the same household question: how to earn enough, save enough and keep enough. An earlier Money Issue in 2019 described itself as a special broadcast looking into the many ways people earn, spend, invest, waste, lose and go without money, a framing that pushed the subject well beyond markets and into ordinary budgeting and survival.

The 2025 Money Issue narrowed that broad approach to a specific goal: securing a fulfilling retirement. In that edition, David Pogue examined the state of Social Security, a program that remains central to retirement planning for millions of Americans. Luke Burbank looked at the FIRE movement, the financial independence strategy aimed at letting people retire early, while Susan Spencer explored the creation of bucket lists, a sign of how retirement has become not just a savings issue but a question of what people hope to do with their time.

The same broadcast also widened the lens with Tracy Smith’s conversation with Cheech & Chong, Robert Costa’s interview with Drew Barrymore after she landed on the cover of AARP: The Magazine at 50, and Seth Doane’s report from Malta, where Americans were finding a more affordable retirement home. That mix of celebrity, consumer strategy and overseas retirement planning showed how the show has treated money as both a personal constraint and a life-shaping force.

CBS says AARP began as an advocacy group for older Americans concerned about Social Security, Medicare and family caregiving, a history that fits the recurring retirement focus of the Money Issue. With Social Security, early retirement and cheaper places to live in old age all part of the same hour, the broadcast reflected the financial anxieties that continue to shape everyday decisions for older Americans and the people planning to join them.