On The Road To Wealth with Suze Orman

I’ve been extremely lucky to live a lifestyle that allows me to interview self-made millionaires and bestselling authors. One of my favorite persons to talk to is superstar Suze Orman who came from my hometown, Chicago.

Suze says, “Money affects each and every one of us, and it is the currency of life and if you think about it, it is a physical manifestation of how we feel about who we are. There are so many people born into poverty who are seriously rich today. Conversely, there are so many people who are born into serious money who are poverty-stricken today – emotions dictate how much you have and get to keep. It has nothing to do with money.”

As with all self-made millionaires in this country, Suze didn’t grow up rich but she became rich when she made the decision to live her making vs. make a living. In a Q&A style interview with the bestselling author of the Laws of Money and Road To Wealth, Suze shared with me some concepts and ideas that I would like to pass on to you.

Enjoy!

On Net Worth versus Self Worth
"I strongly believe that the obstacles that keep us from having more and being more are rooted in the emotional, psychological, and spiritual conditions that have shaped our thoughts.

“Everybody feels that money ultimately determines if you are happy or your emotional state of being. If you have money, you’re happy – wrong! It is your emotional state of being that determines how much money you have and ultimately get to keep. Fear, shame and anger are the three internal obstacles to wealth. Fear that you have credit card debt and you don’t know what you’re going to do. You get this paycheck that fear rises, and you rush out to buy something because you define yourself by the things that you are because you’re so afraid that somebody is going to find out that you have credit card debt. Shamed that you’re 45 years of age and don’t have a pot to pee in, and you don’t know what you want to be when you grow up so, you go out and spend money. Anger – because you’ve been in this marriage for 25 years and your husband just left you powerless, penniless; and you are going to get even at him. Emotions rule your actions when it comes to money.

“The problem is in the end when this is all over, there is not going to be one of us that is able to take a penny with us. We are all going to go out empty handed, including me. So, can somebody tell me what this is all about? True wealth is that which can never be diminished. To be truly wealthy, you not only have to understand what you have, but you have to understand who you are. When your self worth means equally as much to you as your net worth, then you have true financial freedom.”

On The Debt Set Point
“Every single one of us has a Debt Set Point. It’s like a teeter totter---on this end your debt goes up, up, up and here you are on the other end going down, down, down, down. There’s comes a point where each and every one of us hits rock bottom and we realize that we are in serious debt trouble – that is our Debt Set Point. It’s at that point that we start to get out of it, but here is the problem: if you just simply worked on reducing your debt without reducing the weight of your own low self-esteem, your own low self-worth, it won’t work. Your low self-esteem, your low self-worth weighs heavier within you than anything else. You’re sitting there at the bottom of the teeter-totter. And, if you don’t work on that at the exact same time you’re working on reducing your debt; what will happen is that your debt will start to come down; but, it will snap right back up and go even higher. You’ve got to work on your self-worth along with net worth, so that when you’re on the bottom you can raise those legs of yours and give yourself a push up and let your debt go down.”

“[Debt] has to do with why are you spending more money than you know you should be spending – very simple. You define yourself by the things you have around you rather than who you are. You think that when other people see you they will define you and think great thoughts of you if you are leasing a fancy car, you live in a fancy home, you’re wearing designer clothes that are mortgaged to the department stores to the tune of 21-22%, you are nothing more than financial liars because everything that you have around you is mortgaged, leased or credit card rated, and yet everybody thinks that you have so much money because you look like you do, and they all want to be like you.”

On escaping debt
“The credit card companies are vultures. You think they’re doing you a favor when they say to you, ‘Oh, you don’t have to pay your payment this month.’ And, you’re thrilled; but, forget that they’re charging you interest to not have to do that. For example, an $1100 credit card debt at an 18% interest rate, if you pay the minimum every single month that they require, it will take you 12 ½ years to pay it! If you pay $10 more per month, it will reduce it from 12 ½ years to 6 years…period! That’s why you’ve got to pay more than the minimum. The goal of the credit card company is to get you to not pay as much as you want to because the less you pay the longer it goes, the longer it goes, the more interest they make on you and that’s what they’re in business to do!”

On the affects of wealth
“If you hate money, you hate yourself because money is nothing more than an extension of what you have created, so how can you hate it. You don’t hate your furniture, you don’t hate your bed. I laugh at this all the time because people take me into their homes and they show me their artwork, they’re showing me their silver collection, they’re trying to impress me by having me drink out of crystal – why even have them? You’re going to break them and you can’t use them in the dishwasher, and you have to wash them by hand and who has time to do that—but, that’s another story – they show this stuff off as if they are so proud. However, if you brought somebody into a home and they had a pile of money sitting in the living room, you would think that they’re so crass, so rude and vulgar because when you look at money in money form, you hate it. But, if you transform money into a chair, into a couch, into a fancy car, we admire it. We are just simply financially numb because we are not willing to look at financial reality.”