Suze Orman Has Spent Over 40 Years Helping People With Their Money. These Are The 5 Regrets She Hears Again And Again.

Suze Orman has spent over 40 years listening to people explain what went wrong with their money. The same five mistakes keep coming up.

The Jewish Women’s Archive reports that she started at Merrill Lynch as an account executive in 1980. According to the Jewish Women’s Archive, she moved to Prudential-Bache Securities as a vice president of investments in 1983. The Jewish Women’s Archive says she opened her own firm, the Suze Orman Financial Group, in 1987. She ran it for about a decade and has published personal finance advice for roughly three decades, including a New York Times bestseller.

In a Classic Suze School rebroadcast of her Women and Money podcast called “Living a Life of No Regrets,” she gets straight to it: “So let me give you the top five money regrets that I see all the time.”

On her own track record, Orman is direct: “I have failed on many things that I tried. I did not always make perfect decisions. But that doesn’t mean that I regret doing those things because at least I tried.”

Her list holds up. Each regret comes down to the same thing: fear or another person making the calls on money you own. Each one costs you time or control, and both are hard to get back.

Waiting to Invest Burns the One Asset You Can’t Replace

First on her list: not investing earlier. She repeats what she hears from people who held off: “I waited. I was scared. I didn’t think I knew enough.”

Her answer: “Time is the most valuable asset, everybody, you will ever have, and you will never, ever get time back.”

Compounding works only with time. Your profits start earning profits of their own, and that process needs years. If you wait until you feel fully informed, you’ve lost years of growth that no raise later can replace.

Trusting Someone Else’s Fear Over Your Own Plan

Second is “trusting the wrong person, such as a partner, a financial advisor, a family member.” Her rule is frank: “If something doesn’t feel right, it usually isn’t.”

She tells the story of a friend in her forties who works in Hollywood. “She has a lot of money. And she was using a financial advisor that many of her friends in Hollywood were using.” Then a second advisor told her: “Are you crazy? You can’t have 100% of your money invested in equities. That’s far too much risk for you.”

Here’s what happened next, as Orman tells it: “She changed 100% of the money that she had with this financial advisor that she had been with for years and put it at the firm that her friend told her would be better for her.” Orman says fear drove the switch.

Change your allocation when your goals, timeline, or circumstances change. When a confident stranger raises an alarm, ask questions before you move anything.

Silence Hands Control to Whoever Holds the Account

Third is staying silent about money. “You don’t ask, what is our money doing? Where is it?” Orman says. “So your silence creates dependency on whoever else is dealing with your money.”

Her fix: “through knowledge, through getting involved.” Log into every account and know what each one holds.

A Closet Full of Labels Won’t Buy You Power

Fourth is spending to impress, on clothes, handbags and cars, when that money could be building security. Suze Orman’s line about a million dollars of clothes is the best in the episode: “You could put a million dollars of clothes on you. And yet, if you are powerless when it comes to your own money, when you don’t have the strength to say what you want to say, to do all of those things, you could be dressed in every label possible and you will look and appear like a pauper because people recognize your inner power before they admire some stupid clothing that you may have on.”

Someday Is the Costliest Word on Her List

Orman keeps this one for last but not least: “waiting for someday. Waiting for someday. Well, I’ll get around to it.” Her take: “Someday has to be the most expensive word in the English language.”

Her Checklist Only Works If the Documents Are Funded

Start by knowing exactly where your money is. Orman points to the wake of September 11: “Do you know the number of calls I got from women who were married to the top executives of financial firms and they didn’t know anything. They had a lot of money, but they didn’t even know where their money was.”

Get these documents: a will, a living revocable trust, an advance directive, a durable power of attorney for health care, and a financial power of attorney. Most important: “not only do you have them, but you have filled them out, you have actually funded them.”

Funding a trust means moving assets into its name. A house or brokerage account still titled in your own name sits outside the trust, leaving your family vulnerable to probate even though you signed the paperwork. (The full checklist, beneficiary forms and ownership included, is in our free estate guide here.)

Four Questions to Answer Before Bed Tonight

Her instruction: “This is what I want you to do tonight. Not someday.”

1. “Where am I living smaller than I should?”
2. “Where am I staying silent?”
3. “What financial decision am I postponing because I’m scared?”
4. “If I only had five years left, what would I fix today?”