Personal Finance Guru Suze Orman - An Amazing Life Story

Suze Orman is practically a household name. A bestselling author who also hosts a very popular show on CNBC, Orman has leveraged her sparkling personality and financial common sense into a personal empire worth millions. She has written seven self-help books in the personal finance genre. She writes an advice column for O Magazine, published by Oprah Winfrey, a biweekly column for Money Matters on Yahoo's finance website, and contributes to other publications.

I watch The Suze Orman Show every weekend on the Armed Forces Network (AFN) where her radio call-in show is rebroadcast as a television program. I love her no nonsense approach and her charismatic warmth. My favorite portion of the show is the segment "Can I Afford It?" where readers call in with questions about things they want to purchase. After Suze looks over their financial situation, and quickly analyzes their income-to-debt ratio, she either declares that they have been Approved or Denied. Sometimes she even calls back months later to find out if the fan took her advice or not.

I knew that Suze had gotten her start by working as an investment advisor for Merrill Lynch, but I was floored when I went to her website to learn more about her background. It turns out that Suze did not really get involved in the financial area until the age of 29! In fact, her biography doesn't contain any of the elements commonly associated with wealth and success.

A Chicago, Illinois native, Suze left college before completing her degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was majoring in Social Work. After landing in California, where she lived out of a van for several months, Suze wound up waitressing at the Buttercup Bakery in Berkeley. After six years of waiting on others, Suze decided that she wanted to open her own restaurant. She was apparently a very popular waitress, because a group of her customers came up with $50,000 to loan her interest-free as seed money for this project.

Fred Hasbrook, the customer who collected the money, advised her to invest in a money market account at Merrill Lynch, so that is where Suze went. At the time, she was earning $400 a week as a waitress and knew nothing about finance. The stockbroker who took her $50,000 invested it in stock options and lost all of it. In the meantime, Suze had become personally interested in learning money management and had begun training with Merrrill Lunch to be a stockbroker.

As Suze was studying to pass her Series 7 exam - a test that all brokers have to pass to sell stocks - she read that it was unethical and illegal for a broker to invest a client's money in risky strategies without their knowledge or consent. That was just what her stockbroker had done with her money! So, she sued Merrill Lynch, who settled with her by paying back everything she had lost plus the interest, allowing her to pay back Fred Hasbrook and the other customers from the Buttercup Bakery.

Not only did I find Suze's story amazing because she didn't get her start until the age when most people are well established in their careers, but also because she began life in a lower middle class family and learned everything that she knows about money on her own. Additionally, she had a speech impediment when she was little and had to overcome the stigma of a perceived learning disability growing up. By the way, Suze did eventually finish off her Bachelor's Degree in 1976.

Her story is a model for all of us. Suze shows that anyone with enough drive and willingness can educate themselves about money management, overcome obstacles, invest wisely, and become successful, even in these turbulent economic times.