Suze Orman

Businessperson

• Born: June 5, 1951
• Place of Birth: Chicago, Illinois

FINANCIAL ADVISER AND WRITER

Orman is a best-selling author and television show host who offers advice on personal finance to a wide audience.

AREAS OF ACHIEVEMENT: Business; entertainment

Early Life

Suze Orman was born the daughter of Chicago delicatessen owner Morry Orman and his wife, Ann. The Ormans were Russian Jewish first-generation immigrants. By her own accounts, Suze Orman’s childhood was unhappy and stressful. She was considered to be a poor student in school. A speech problem, which made it hard for her to pronounce certain letter sounds, made it difficult for her to read aloud. Because of the tendency of people to consider this a sign of intellectual deficiency and to dismiss her as being stupid, she developed a low sense of self-esteem. She had an especially difficult time mastering English; however, she excelled in mathematics, developing a propensity for numbers that would prove valuable for her future career in finance.

Her father’s small business had a precarious existence; the Orman family subsisted under straitened circumstances. A fire destroyed the business, and when Orman’s father tried to recoup the family fortune by using a part of his house as a room-and-board business, he was further set back by a lodger who filed a successful lawsuit against her father after falling and injuring himself. Orman credits her early experiences as helping to motivate her.

She did go on to study for a bachelor’s degree in social work at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, at one stage washing dishes to help support herself, but she dropped out abruptly when she was just short of completing the academic requirements for her degree. In 1973, Orman borrowed $1,500 from her brother, Robert, traveled to the West Coast in a van, settled in Berkeley, California, and earned her living as a waitress at Buttercup Bakery. She was finally awarded her degree from Illinois in 1976, having completed her final class at California State University, Hayward.

Life’s Work

Orman worked at Buttercup Bakery for seven years, until she confided to a longtime regular customer, Fred Hasbrook, about her aspirations to set up her own restaurant business. He arranged to get her a personal loan for $50,000, to be repaid in ten years’ time, interest-free. She entrusted the loan to a Merrill Lynch stockbroker and shortly thereafter lost all of her investments. Surprisingly, she applied for a stockbroker’s position at Merrill Lynch, which viewed her degree in social work as less desirable than credentials in business and finance. Nevertheless, she was accepted into the company’s training program and secured employment. Later, she discovered that she had been cheated by the Merrill Lynch broker who had originally handled her investment, and she sued the company, reclaimed her money with interest, and repaid Hasbrook and others who had helped her. Orman, nonetheless, remained with Merrill Lynch until 1983, when she accepted the position of vice president in charge of investments at Prudential Bache Securities. From 1987 to 1997, she branched out on her own, founding and running the Suze Orman Financial Group.

It was as an author that she began to attain national celebrity status. In 1997, Orman published The Nine Steps to Financial Freedom: Practical and Spiritual Steps So You Can Stop Worrying, which made The New York Times best-seller list (seven of her books would make the list). This was rapidly followed by You’ve Earned It, Don’t Lose It: Mistakes You Can’t Afford to Make When You Retire (1997), written in collaboration with Linda Mead; Suze Orman’s Financial Guidebook: Putting the Nine Steps to Work (1998); and The Courage to Be Rich: Creating a Life of Material and Spiritual Abundance (1999).

Her subsequent publications include The Road to Wealth: A Comprehensive Guide to Your Money—Everything You Need to Know in Good Times and Bad (2001; revised and updated in 2008); The Laws of Money: Five Timeless Secrets to Get Out and Stay Out of Financial Trouble (2003); The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous, and Broke (2005); Women and Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny (2007), with a Spanish-language version published under the title Las mujeres y el dinero: Toma control de su destino; andSuze Orman’s 2009 Action Plan (2009). In 2011, she published The Money Class, and the following year a revise Nine Steps to Financial Freedom was released. She introduced a children's book, The Adventures of Billy & Penny, which features a dollar bill and a penny who are pals determined to help the family with which they live learn their value.

Orman has also designed special digital financial-aid kits that bear her name: Protection Portfolio;FICO Kit;Will and Trust Kit;Insurance Kit; Identity Theft Kit; and Save Yourself Retirement Program. She has also produced DVDs and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) specials of her books. For her work on public television, Orman has won two Daytime Emmy Awards.

Orman has long worked with television personality Oprah Winfrey. She was a frequent guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show and regularly appeared on Oprah's All Stars on the OWN TV network. She was an editor and columnist for O: The Oprah Magazine, as well as Costco Connection.

In 2002, Orman aired the first episode of her television show, the weekly Suze Orman Show, on CNBC; its last episode aired in March 2015. Her six-episode, lecture-style America's Money Class ran on OWN in early 2012. After the Suze Orman Show ended, Orman went on to develop a new midweek daytime series, Suze Orman's Money Wars, as a venue in which to address the divisive personal conflicts that finances can engender. She retired in 2016.

Orman and her spouse, Kathy "KT" Travis, live in the Bahamas. Travis, who is also Orman's business partner, illustrated Orman's 2017 children's book.

Significance

Orman has been hailed as the foremost personal financial expert on television and in print. She has a genius for generating publicity and for supporting women in becoming financially savvy. Orman offers her listeners and readers knowledgeable, straightforward, and realistic advice about financial matters. Certainly Orman has raised the awareness of personal finance and other economic issues among the general public. Her confidence in the economic recovery proved to be a positive factor in assisting people to cope with the effects of recession.

Bibliography

Barrett, William P. “Sizzling Suze.” Forbes 28 Dec. 1998: 118–20. Print.

Dominus, Susan. "Suze Orman Is Having a Moment." New York Times Magazine. New York Times, 14 May 2009. Web. 28 Mar. 2016.

Grainger, David. “The Suze Orman Show: The Hyperkinetic and Ubiquitous Self-Help Guru Is Brimming with Financial-Planning Heresies. So Is This Woman for Real? You Bet.” Fortune 147.12 (2003): 82–90. Print.

Jackson, Candace. "Suze Orman’s Practical Real-Estate Portfolio." Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones, 11 Dec. 2014. Web. 28 Mar. 2016.

Leonhardt, Megan. "Suze Orman: 'It's Never Too Late to Start a New Chapter in Your Life.'" CNBC, 19 Dec. 2019, www.cnbc.com/2019/12/19/suze-orman-says-its-never-too-late-to-start-a-new-chapter.html. Accessed 3 Sept. 2024.

Orman, Suze. The Road to Wealth: A Comprehensive Guide to Your Money—Everything You Need to Know in Good and Bad Times. New York: Riverhead, 2008. Print.