Posted on 02/11/2009 1:32:44 PM PST by presidio9
"'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 in the wake of 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 PBS, 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:
(Excerpt) Read more at articles.moneycentral.msn.com ...
I never heard of her.
Listen to Dave Ramsey instead.
HA....I’ve heard she has nearly all of HER MONEY in bonds....probably tax exempt.
Agreed.
I used to watch Orman very early Sunday mornings - preferable to most infomercials - years back... Quit after she became a shill for ‘creative mortgages’ and ‘equity farming’...... (Even in ‘03/’04, those struck me as risky -and possibly immoral - financial maneuverings)
Thus... They're just entertainers selling advertising and completely full of it when it comes to competent investment/financial advice.
An experienced professional personal advisor who really gets to know YOU is the closest you'll ever come to getting good advice!!!
Suzie Orman gives very basic advice which is very hard to argue with. This article tries and it’s just a hatchet job.
I guess this is a liberal article because it attacks traditional financial advice. For example, there is something wrong with telling people to be responsible with credit cards?
And the author attacks income averaging (buying stocks consistently as they go both up and down) as “throwing good money after bad”.
This is a very ignorant article. He says his parents were told to income average before the bottom fell out of their portfolio in 2000. Well duh if they held a diversified portfolio and continued to invest they would have purchased stocks very low and the market rose to record levels a few years later.
My bottom line, this is someone trying to get known by attacking someone more famous.
If you want people you disagree with to take you seriously, you need to at least occasionally watch something other than Fox News. Suze Orman is a moron but she is definitely a media A-lister. She more famous than Rachael Madow, and at least as famous as Maria Bartiromo.
Actually, she's a lesbian who has never slept with a man (or so she says)!
Yes, she has said she has about 98% of her income in tax-free municipal bonds. Smart move, looking at what has happened to the stocks and mutual funds. She has said she is not trying to create a lot more wealth, just preserve what she has.
(Although study after study has shown that personal bankruptcies are caused primarily by catastrophic events like 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, Suze tends toward psychological causes that invariably blame the victim.)
I don’t know either Suze nor the writer. From the paragraph above, I already vastly prefer Suze. It sounds like the writer thinks that if you are in a financial mess, you’re a victim (sounds familiar?). From the article, it seems like the biggest thing that Suze is responsible for is seeing the financial tsunami coming. How many people really did? And why concentrate on Suze and not most everybody else, especially the people who got us in this mess? Last time I checked Suze did not write legislation, and she did not run an investment bank. There seems to be something personal behind this article.
I’ve always felt that if TVs moneypreachers were worth listening to, they wouldn’t be on television.
They would be in the real world making real money.
I’ll second that on Dave Ramsey.
Maybe not so smart if the municipalities default and take the insurers down with them...
Thirds on the Dave Ramsey thing.
I forgot to put in my reply: she buys insured AAA tax free municipal bonds
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.