Suze Orman: Queen of the Crisis

“I’m very, very sorry to say that my business is skyrocketing,” the personal-finance guru Suze Orman said one late January afternoon. The Dow was down almost 200 points, and Orman was lounging on the terrace of her San Francisco town house, wearing a leopard-print tunic and cowboy boots. She looked up and popped a grape into her mouth. “This is happening because of the lies and deceit and greed of Wall Street, the mortgage companies, the SEC, the Administration,” she said, growing agitated. Her outlook on the economy is practically apocalyptic: Millions more jobs will be lost, the stock market will probably continue to drop, and things won’t start to get better until 2015. “Shysters! They’re all shysters!” she said. “I have said it over and over and over again.”

The mortgage crisis, the deficit, the mass layoffs and the home foreclosures sweeping the country are all signs that the economy is a wreck, but for Orman, 57, things could hardly be better. (See the best business deals of 2008.)

Like a medic tending injured soldiers on a battlefield, she spends her days fielding calls from people who are in financial peril–drowning in credit-card debt or facing adjustable-rate mortgages that threaten to bury them alive. Each week they phone in to Orman’s CNBC show for advice or buy one of her nine books, which offer the hope that they might save themselves from the financial hell they’ve created. Orman rushed out a paperback response to the economic crisis called Suze Orman’s 2009 Action Plan, which is on the New York Times best-seller list, and the ratings for her TV show are among the highest at CNBC. She promotes savings accounts for TD Ameritrade and hawks identity-theft kits on her website. Requests for her to speak, at $80,000 a pop, are flowing in from all over the world. It’s a sign of just how bad things are that watching her is so compelling–in a rubbernecking sort of way–because people have done such reckless things with their money.

When Orman talks about the government officials responsible for fixing the crisis, her voice often drips with contempt. During a recent appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, she asked Alabama Republican Senator Richard Shelby why Americans should trust members of Congress who can’t manage their own personal finances. And the suggestion by Larry Summers, President Barack Obama’s economic adviser, that Americans should start buying cars again to help jolt the economy was “the most irresponsible thing anybody could say,” said Orman. “Mr. Summers, I am so sorry. I understand we have to spur the economy of the U.S., but don’t do it off the people who don’t have jobs, who don’t have a pot to pee in.” She went on: “Sir, there are tent cities. Go and look at who is standing in line to get soup. There are white collar workers in those lines now.” (See pictures of the demise of Bernard Madoff.)

Over the top as she is, Orman’s ubiquitous presence has become a sort of unofficial economic barometer: the worse things get, the harder she is to avoid. Her style seems almost intentionally annoying: she screams on camera, her blue eyes practically bugging out of her head. But she has long been saying what America needs to hear, crusading against credit-card debt and urging people to save money and pay down their mortgages. Since the onset of the recession, she has made some subtle adjustments to her image, positioning herself more as a populist crisis manager than as a promoter of the American Dream. That hasn’t shielded her from criticism for not foreseeing the deepest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, or at least for not making it the core of her message. But if some analysts question the soundness of Orman’s advice, especially given today’s extreme financial conditions, few of her fans do, in part because she sounds so convincing when she says she’s on their side. When asked whether she could have done more to warn people about the real estate, stock-market and credit bubbles of the past few years, Orman said, “I did everything I could.”

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A Woman’s Work
Between taping episodes of her TV show at CNBC studios in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Orman reclined on the couch in the green room, her teeth glowing white. Her sunglasses were slipping down her nose, and she was made up with a powdery orange tan and zipped tight into a butterscotch leather motorcycle jacket. “A woman’s nature is to nurture. A woman gives birth,” Orman said. “Men have it right when it comes to earning money and asking for a raise,” she continued. “But how many women do you see at the track?”

After you watch a few episodes of her program, it becomes clear why Orman believes that men are responsible for most of the economic carnage rippling across the globe. One of the viewers who called in–Nancy from Sacramento–had just related a sad tale: she and her husband had taken out a $100,000 equity line of credit on their house and invested all of it in shares of one company. It was now worth $700. (See the 100 best TV shows of all time.)

“So who was more gung-ho, you or your husband?” Orman asked knowingly. “You had a bottle of wine and got tipsy? Did you go to bed that night and have fun?” Her producers groaned in the control booth.

“Suze, I’m in dire straits …” began another call, from Shirley in New Jersey. Others followed from people trying to renegotiate their mortgages or struggling to take care of aging parents. Eventually, Orman started getting antsy. “We should call this show Get Aggravated with Suze Orman,” she said after a rant about the mortgage companies. “Can you hear my tummy growling? I’m sitting here fantasizing about a McDouble cheeseburger with onions!” (See nine kid foods to avoid.)

Considering the human suffering around her, Orman’s demeanor remains perky and optimistic. She believes that people can sense that she wants what’s in their best interests. As she waited to be called to the CNBC set, a woman in a uniform rolled a cart of food into the green room. “Hi, Suze,” the woman said, bursting into a huge smile. She carefully laid out bowls of yogurt and muesli, and vegetables with dip. When the woman started arranging cans of soda on the table, Orman shooed her back. “Take that away,” Orman said. “People don’t need that crap. If it’s there, people will eat that crap. Yuck.” The woman replaced the cans with bottles of water.

“I think people can feel my passion, that I want to help them,” Orman said a few minutes later. “When the woman who serves food lights up when she sees me–ask her if she lights up when she sees the other talent.”

The Limits of Prudence
Orman’s personal story is an important part of the product she’s selling. She grew up in a modest household on the South Side of Chicago, where her father ran a deli. She dropped out of the University of Illinois (she later finished her degree) and spent six years waitressing in Berkeley, Calif. After losing $50,000 she had been lent to a stockbroker at Merrill Lynch, she became a Merrill broker herself. She launched her own financial-planning company in 1987 and then wrote her first book, You’ve Earned It, Don’t Lose It, which became a best seller. She has made her mark offering commonsense advice tailored to people, especially women, who aren’t financially sophisticated. (See the top 10 financial-crisis buzzwords.)

Many years later, Orman is the most recognizable personal-finance expert in the world, but she didn’t get there on her own. The individual she refers to as “my K.T.,” a.k.a. Kathy Travis, a 56-year-old former advertising executive and Orman’s life partner, was key to her transformation into a financial self-help juggernaut. The two met when Travis moved to California after working for Ogilvy & Mather in Hong Kong. When they were introduced at a dinner party eight years ago, Travis explained that her expertise was in building brands, and Orman asked, “What can you do for mine?”

“I didn’t know who she was, and I said, ‘Well, how old are you?'” Travis recalled. Orman was 49 at the time, and Travis told her she had only five years left before she’d be too old to do much of anything, especially on television. “She got so taken aback that I think that is what intrigued Suze about me,” Travis said. “That’s kind of how it all started.”

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Travis is as responsible as anyone for the power of the Orman brand. In addition to introducing Orman to opera, ballet, foreign travel and fine dining–Orman’s favorite meal is crispy Taco Bell tacos–Travis manages Orman’s speaking engagements and media appearances. Travis was instrumental in expanding Orman’s recognition outside the U.S. and launching her lucrative nonbook products, such as her identity-theft and FICO kits and her contracts with TD Ameritrade and Avon.

“I worked for the best clients in the world. Now I have Suze Orman, who’s like my dream come true,” said Travis, who is petite, with spiky white hair and twinkly brown eyes. She gazed at Orman across the terrace of their San Francisco home. “All my life, I wanted to have the power of the spotlight. Now I’ve found my perfect talent.”

But for all her success, Orman is no less fallible than some of the economic wizards she criticizes. Her philosophy can be described as prudence and moderation–live within your means is her mantra–but there are elements of her road map that could have put you on the path to serious problems if you had followed them at the wrong time. She has long been fixated on the FICO score, a number that reflects a person’s creditworthiness, as the key to improving one’s financial situation. The score determines the interest rate people are charged on credit cards, auto loans and mortgages, as well as how much money they can borrow. Almost all of Orman’s books include a discussion of how to improve FICO scores to get cheaper credit. Orman now has a business relationship with the Fair Isaac Corp., the company that calculates and sells FICO scores; she plugs the company in her books, while Fair Isaac sells her FICO Kit Platinum on its website for $49.95. (See the top 10 non-fiction books of 2008.)

Home ownership is a cornerstone of Ormanworld, and a good FICO score makes it easier. “A home is flat-out the best big-ticket purchase you will ever make,” she wrote in The Money Book for the Young, Fabulous and Broke, which came out in hardcover in 2005 and paperback in 2007. “Just like your student loans, mortgage debt is truly good debt.” The book, which is geared toward people in their 20s, suggests that a 3% down payment on a home is acceptable in some circumstances and recommends a hybrid mortgage, which involves a fixed-rate loan that converts to an adjustable-rate one at some future date (“the Goldilocks option”). Under normal circumstances, this might work out fine, but if you had followed that strategy when the book came out, you might have been ruined when the housing market fell apart. (See pictures of Americans in their homes.)

Bill Fleckenstein, a personal-finance columnist and the author of Greenspan’s Bubbles, criticizes Orman and others like her for suggesting that “automatic pilot” investing will lead to riches and for not seeing the risks of the stock-market and real estate bubbles. “‘No one knew’–that happens to be a lot of B.S. Lots of people knew. It was obvious,” Fleckenstein said. “If someone had no understanding of the financial crisis and they completely missed it, then why should you listen to what they say now?”

Orman says she did everything she could have done to help her followers avoid financial calamity. She points to a 2004 CNBC show she did in which she predicted that the stock market would climb for a few years before dropping to 2002 levels. She says her emphasis has always been only on having money in the market that won’t be touched for at least 10 years. (Although this isn’t a sure thing either, since the past 10-year period in the stock market has been one of the worst-performing in history.) Orman also broadcast later shows on which she said people should be careful with adjustable-rate and interest-only loans and expressed concern about the housing mania.

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“The theme has been for a long time, Get out of credit-card debt, know your FICO score, pay our homes off, don’t use anything other than a fixed-rate mortgage, real estate has hit its top.” She paused and thought for a moment. “Although … I really thought a real estate investment was the best investment you could make over time,” she said, the closest she comes to acknowledging a mistake. Orman owns five homes, although she’s not sure she’ll make a profit on the last one she bought–a luxury apartment in New York City’s Plaza Hotel, which she purchased for $3.6 million in December 2007, at the peak of the market. (At least she paid for it in cash.) (See pictures of modernist houses.)

An online diatribe by James Scurlock that recently appeared on the website the Big Money accused Orman of giving bad advice. The piece generated a flurry of attention, mostly among Orman defenders, who accused the author of twisting the facts. Orman said she was unperturbed. “When somebody is that off base and obviously so self-serving, I don’t even let it bother me, because any intelligent person who reads it knows that he is doing it for the sensation of doing it,” she said.

That wasn’t the first time a reporter has taken shots at her, but she has her way of dealing with it when it happens. “Obviously, when I want to, I do investigations into the people to find out, What does their economic situation look like?” she said. “One person who did this in the past–he has such severe debt, owns a home that was, like, $100,000, fights with his wife all the time, drives a junker of a car, doesn’t have a pot to pee in. It just validated the fact that when people are so vindictive and they’re really trying to slam you, it’s because they’re so desperate–they’re trying to do anything to get noticed. I just feel sorry for them,” she said. “I’m proud that I make money, that I work hard, that I’ve created what I’ve created. But I can tell you this: I haven’t hurt one person getting here.” (See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis.)

After her CNBC taping finished, Orman swept across the parking lot toward a waiting Town Car. Her longtime driver, Jean Germain, a strapping gentleman from Haiti, came rushing over to take a garment bag from her hands. In lieu of a bonus, last year Orman opened a retirement account for him and made the maximum contribution of $5,000. The cash is sitting in a money-market fund until she decides that the market has bottomed out. She plans to dollar-cost-average into exchange-traded funds and a few individual stocks, as she suggests doing in her books. (Read “Lay Off, Suze Orman!”)

As for her own money, she said she has about $25 million, almost all of which is invested in municipal bonds; she has $885,000 in the stock market (it was closer to $1.3 million before the recent plunge). She’s been criticized for not having more in stocks given that that’s where she tells others to put their long-term cash, but she said her focus was on security for herself in case her business suddenly dried up and she had to retire. If the market keeps dropping, which she expects, she plans to invest more: “It wouldn’t surprise me if in the next year or two, I have close to $2 or $3 million in the market,” she said. She values her five homes at $15 million: the San Francisco town house; a two-bedroom beach condo near Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; a house in South Africa; and two apartments in Manhattan. Orman believes that people who don’t have money shouldn’t buy things–they should fund their IRAs instead–while those who have a lot of it should spread it around. Her biggest indulgence is the $300,000 to $500,000 she spends each year flying on private planes. She’s also eaten out every night since November to support the restaurant industry. (See the top 10 food trends of 2008.)

As her car inched across the Hudson River, Orman explained how much she admires President Obama. She likes the $787 billion stimulus package, although the size of the debt the government is taking on “scares me to death.” When asked whether people suggest that she run for President someday, Orman said, “All the time.” In fact, just a few months ago, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin invited her to lunch.

“I said, ‘Sir, I really don’t have time. I’m sorry,'” Orman recounted. She sounded a little wistful. “I was telling somebody that, and they said, ‘Suze, you don’t say no to lunch with Robert Rubin!'” she continued. “I said, ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t have time. That isn’t the direction I’m going.'”

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