"'Tell me what I need to know,' people often say to me. 'Here is what you need to know,' I answer." -- Suze Orman, "The Road to Wealth"
How a bottle-blond former waitress and self-described "55-year-old virgin" with a taste for the good life became the financial messiah for millions of Americans might be a fun Lifetime original movie. Why the masses continue to invest their faith in Suze Orman after a financial meltdown she never saw coming is a more timely question.
The answer is complicated.
If you've managed to avoid Orman over the past decade, you don't watch "Oprah," CNBC or the Public Broadcasting Service, and you've probably never entered an airport bookstore, where her toothy visage graces the covers of numerous best-sellers, the latest of which, "Suze Orman's 2009 Action Plan," has more than 1 million copies in print and has, according to her publisher, been downloaded 2.2 million times from the author's Web site.
- Talk back: Do you listen to Suze Orman?
There, you might also be persuaded to open an Orman-sponsored TD Ameritrade brokerage account or buy one of the products that she also sells on QVC, including the Suze Orman FICO Kit Platinum Version w/Action Planner ($47.70), the Suze Orman Identity Theft Protection Kit w/Anti-Spyware ($39.78), and Suze Orman's Organize and Protect Financial System ($66 plus S&H; Easy Pay! installment plan available).
Orman is that most modern breed of capitalist: the human-industry, self-mythologizing.
"Suze has a unique grasp of the role money plays in our lives, as well as the gift of timing: She tells us exactly what we need to know, precisely when we need to know it." So, at least, claims the jacket copy of one of her books.
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Orman has a lot to say about emotional roadblocks, among other things: "Falling in love is simple -- or so it often seems in retrospect"; "Tears are God's way of forgiving you"; "You will never achieve a sense of power over your life until you have power over your money"; and "The stock market is like a pot of soup."
She has less patience for statistics. Although study after study has shown that personal bankruptcies are caused primarily by catastrophic events such as divorce, job loss and, above all, medical bills, and that most of us are struggling with a gap between our income growth and the soaring cost of necessities like housing, Orman tends toward psychological causes that invariably blame the victim.
Who is struggling these days, according to Orman? "People who grew up without much money and later earn a comfortable living sometimes spend too much to make up for what they didn't get as children. . . . People who feel entitled to the good life or are unconsciously copying a mother or father who lived beyond her or his means. . . . If you feel the need to impress people with what you have rather than with who you are, you are at high risk for credit card abuse."
This from a woman who spends half a million dollars a year chartering private jets and who sells "Cruise With Suze" packages on an Italian luxury liner. (She has also hawked for GM, claiming that leasing a luxury car -- you know, the kind that people drive to impress other people -- is a terrific financial decision: "If you ask me, that's smart money!") No wonder she winks more than Sarah Palin, girlfriend.
Continued: The courage to be rich
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