If you knew Suze…

Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine, Nov, 1998 by Robert Frick

How Suze Orman's brand of magnetism and mysticism has made her the hottest personal-finance guru.

Suze Orman is imploring a man named Bob to scream out. "I have an unlimited source of income that will more than meet my needs!" And he does. Still not satisfied, Orman has poor Bob stand on a chair and yell out his "new truth." And he does. She assures him that by repeating it, his "financial molecular structure" will "truly change."

It's upon such rituals that Suze (pronounced Suzy) Orman has built here reputation as the high priestess of personal finance. She hasn't ferreted out any new financial truths, but she seems to have tapped into people's primal fears about money and its effect on happiness, relationships and self-esteem.

And it doesn't hurt that she's a pitchwoman par excellence. Like Martha Stewart, to whom she's often compared, Orman is everywhere: on the New York Times bestseller list (with The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom); hosting a regular show on the QVC shopping channel, where she sells thousands of books, tapes and CDs in a single show; raising millions of dollars for PBS stations; and holding forth on Oprah.

Here pitch is a supercharged blend of Norman Vincent Peale optimism, regression therapy, Eastern and New Age spiritualism, and basic financial advice, pureed and served up with a charismatic, clear-eyed delivery that makes even her wackier ideas sound believable. Her audience is primarily women, although her message also plays well with men--with anyone, in fact, who feels that inhibitions about money are standing in the way of making productive choices about spending, investing and saving.

When Orman gives advice, she shifts between the practical and the mystical. For example, she'll give specific answers to questions about borrowing from a 401(k) plan to pay offcredit card debt. But when one PBS caller asked if he should pay off his mortgage early, she replied, "If it makes you feel powerful, then do it."

A favorite Orman drill is to ask audience members to rip a dollar bill in half. Most cringe at the idea. "There's something evil about it," says a man named Mark. "That's because money has an energy field," Orman explains. "It is alive. The energy field is transformed when you use money to buy something, but in this form it has an energy, and that's what makes you feel sick."

That sort of stuff makes Orman's critics gag. Yet followers can't get enough of her. "Wait until you meet her," says one fan. "You'll kind of get into this energy field."

As you weave your way into the steep hills above Oakland, Cal., you re likely to miss the driveway hidden among the foliage. So you back up and park behind a very long 1987 BMW 725. The car is almost as big as Orman s house, a modest dwelling of fewer than 1,000 square feet that she has owned since 1976.

Orman walks out to greet you, smiling and squinting in the morning sun, a cell phone tucked to her ear. She describes you to a friend: "Well, he's cute. He weighs about 350 pounds..." Her long face, with its strong, handsome features, breaks into a mischievous grin. She is dressed in her trademark dark clothes--slacks and a long jacket. No crackling aurora borealis is in evidence.

Orman, who is 47 and single, bought her home when she was a waitress, and hung on to it when she became a millionaire. "Everything around me is very tasteful and beautiful, but nothing is grand," she says. "I can become more without needing more."

You walk past gardens that extend up a small slope, past a Japanese maple and a shapely plum tree, heavy with fruit. Jasmine and honeysuckle perfume the air. There's an occasional stone cherub, and crystals peek up through the soil.

Inside, the house is bright, airy, austere and, like the gardens, almost Eastern in aspect. A big copper statue of the Indian god Ganesha, destroyer of obstacles, is the most striking piece. Nearby sprawls a floppy Woody doll from the movie Toy Story. A framed clip of the New York Times bestseller list, showing her book on top of the "how-to" heap, sits on an end table.

Orman stretches out on a long chair and talks about her past. She grew up with two older brothers in working-class Chicago, where her father was the owner of a small, struggling deli. What money the family had dried up when the Ormans were sued by a woman who was paralyzed in an accident at a boarding house owned by Orman's father and grandfather. On one occasion, Orman's mother told her she couldn't afford to give her a dollar to go to a swimming pool with friends--but Orman filched the money from her parents because she was afraid her friends wouldn't like her if they thought she was poor. She dreamed of having her picture taken on a pony, although "we didn't have the money."

Ann Orman, who went to work as a legal secretary to help support the family, professes surprise that her daughter's upbringing had such an effect on her. "You didn't think you were poor because most people were poor," says Ann, who still lives in Chicago. "But Suze felt that she was."