← Suze Orman's Women & Money (And Everyone Smart Enough To Listen)
Suze Orman's Women & Money (And Everyone Smart Enough To Listen)
Friendship Isn't A Financial Plan
00:20:53
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- [00:00]
A
Susie, is it really true? Is what really true? The alliance certificates. Oh, you mean the rate that they're offering? It's unbelievable. Yes, it's true. And all of you need to take advantage of it. Currently, if you go to myalliant.com you can get a one year certificate for 4.10%. That's a lot higher than a one year treasury, especially if you live in a low state tax bracket. For $75,000 or more, it is 4.15 APR. So if you leave all the money in there, that's what you get. So if you have money at a bank, at a brokerage firm, anywhere that you want a great rate, I have to tell you, go to myalliant.com now before it disappears. I'm going, Suzy. I bet you are. KT.
- [01:07]
December 7, 2025. Welcome, everybody, to the Women in Money podcast as well as everybody smart enough to listen. And today is Susie's school. So get out your Suzy notebooks and we're going to start Susie school with a story. And the lesson of the story is friendship isn't a financial plan. Friendship isn't a financial plan. Okay? That's the lesson of this story. Are you ready? So I'm telling you this story truthfully because I really think every one of you needs to hear this. Especially, you know, women. We tend to do things we don't want to do. We say yes when we want to say no. We think one thing, yet we say another. And I include myself in this, by the way. I've learned that lesson, trust me. My new lesson is don't say yes, Suze Orman, when you want to say no. So if we're not careful, then this situation could possibly happen to you and it can cost you a whole lot of money. There's this woman, and let's just call her Susan, okay? And she had about $2 million invested with a financial advisor who had been doing absolutely remarkable for her. And we're talking consistent 15, 20, even 28% returns over the past few years, which is spectacular. And he charged her a 1.5% advisory fee. Now, I know, I know I told all of you I wouldn't be paying more than 1% in an investment advisory fee. But sometimes when an advisor is incredible demand and they are producing results like the ones I just told you about year after year after year, then if they want to charge 1.5%, and after that 1.5% fee, they're still talking 15, 20, 28, 30% returns. I don't Have a problem with that. So here we are. And one day Susan is out to lunch with her really, really good friend. And what did good friends do? They always talk about their kids. And the good friend happens to say, susan, my son just became a financial advisor, and is it possible that you could do me a favor? Do you think you would transfer your account to him so he can look like he has clients that have money?
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Think about what this good friend just asked Susan.
- [04:06]
To change her account to her son who just became a financial advisor just so he can look good. Now, besides the fact that I've told all of you in general, I wouldn't pay more than 1% for an investment advisory fee unless the advisor is seriously worth it. And the numbers tell the story. I've also said to you, I wouldn't dare invest with somebody, especially in these kinds of markets, who hadn't been an advisor for at least five years, 10 years, 15 or 20 years, many, many years. I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole, however. Okay, but because Susan didn't want to upset her friend, because even though she may have wanted to say no, she said, okay, yes, yes, I'll do it. And I find that most women say yes out of guilt. You know, I say this all the time. Women would rather say yes out of fear that somebody won't like them anymore versus no, out of love for herself. So what did she do? She actually called her financial advisor up and told him, I'm moving my account. And when the advisor said, why in the world are you moving your account? And she said, well, number one, and the most important reason is because he's only charging me 1% instead of 1.5%.
- [05:55]
Okay, now just want you to think about this. And this is the Suzy school lesson of the day. And the one mistake I want you always to avoid. You never base financial decisions on friendship. You never judge an advisor solely by their fee. It's not the fee that matters. It's the results. It's the track record. It is the performance. Would you rather pay someone one and a half percent who has proven that they can make you real, sizable returns year in and year out, or 1% to someone who's absolutely brand new, untested, and simply hoping to save that half a percent and to help them out? You have to know the answer to that. You just have to know. And the lesson here is what? Friendship is not a financial plan. Guilt is not a strategy. Do you get this, everybody? And loyalty does not grow your money. It does not. So I Want you to write this one lesson down. You must protect your own financial security, even if that means saying no to someone you care about.
- [07:24]
All right? So now that we know that friendship isn't a financial plan, the next thing I want you to learn is about tax lost harvesting the correct way. And the reason that I say the correct way is because a few weeks ago I talked about this and I told you some of the things that I was doing in my own account. And then you go to do it and you write me. I go, no, no, don't do that. So let's try this again. Tax loss harvesting is when you have gains in your investment account outside of a retirement account, and possibly losses as well. And you want to offset your gains with your losses. So you don't owe as much in income tax as you would if all you had was gains. So let's talk about this. You need to first know the difference between realized gains versus unrealized gains. So what is a realized gain? A realized gain. Think of the words that I'm using. A realized gain is obviously you realized your gain. You actually got it. Which means you sold something, you took a profit, and you took a profit because you sold it for more than you paid, and that's a realized gain. The IRS sees it, and then the IRS taxes you on it. Just that simple. What is an unrealized gain? And this again is just a fancy word for you haven't realized them. You have a profit, but you haven't sold it yet. So the gain lives only on paper. You haven't realized it. So there's nothing to taxable yet. So how does tax loss harvesting work? All right, just listen. Let's say you have a stock you don't want anymore and it's sitting at a loss. You can sell that stock, realize the loss, and use that loss to offset any realized gains that you already have. That's one way that you can do it. Now, sometimes you actually have more of a loss than you do gains. So if you don't use up all of your loss, you can carry it forward to future years. If you don't have any gain at all, you can take $3,000 off and keep doing that every year. So why am I telling you all this? Because I. A lot of you heard me say you sell your losses against your gains, so you don't owe income taxes. But here's the problem. You never, ever sell a stock at a loss. If you want to own that stock, and you best write that down, you never sell a stock Just to take a tax loss, if you believe in that stock.
- [10:41]
Because listen to me, when a stock you love goes down, that is not the time to run from it. That is the time to do what everybody, dollar cost, average into it. That is the time to buy more. So let's say you love Apple and it drops, it's down. You don't sell it to take a tax loss. You buy more shares at a lower price and bring down your average price cost. So can we just get that one thing straight? If you still want the stock, you keep it. You only sell a losing stock if you want to get rid of it and you don't want to own it anymore. Got that? So you really need to understand that, because some of you are doing this because you're writing me, you have some losses in stocks that you actually like. Stocks like Oracle, stocks like PayPal, great stocks. And you want to sell those stocks to take a loss to offset some realized gains that you have in your portfolio, obviously outside of a retirement account. And I'm like, please don't do that. And people are asking me, well, why shouldn't I do that? And the reason you shouldn't do that is when you take a loss in a stock, you cannot buy that stock back for at least 30 days. Now, 30 days may seem like a really short period of time, but not in these markets. I have seen stocks go down 40 points, and all of a sudden, two weeks, they're up 60 points. So you think you're going to outsmart these markets, and all of a sudden you sold for a little loss, and now 30 days hasn't passed, and now you sold it at, let's just say, $50 a share. You bought it at 60, and now it's at 80. But you weren't able to still be in it because you sold it at a loss simply to take a loss. No, again, you only sell a loss when you no longer want to own that stock and you can use that loss to help yourself for tax purposes. Anything else? I don't think so.
- [13:14]
So you're confused about that. If you have, however, a stock that you no longer want, which was true in my case, there were two stocks that I had a loss on and I no longer wanted to own those stocks. I made a mistake. Fine, I'm going to take the loss. But at the time when I did that, I didn't have any realized gains to offset that loss. I didn't realize any gains yet. I had a lot of unrealized gains, lots of unrealized Gains, but no realize gains because I still like all the stocks that I own except for those two. Okay, so what did I do? And this was just an example. I sold the number of shares of stock that I had a big gain in that was equivalent to the loss that I was taking. So they offset each other directly. So what did I do then? I immediately bought the stock that I had a gain in back the exact same numbers of shares. Now what did I gain by doing that? Let's just say I bought that stock at 7 and now that stock is 160 or 70, which is true in this one particular stock, Palantir. So even if I just sold 10 shares of Palantir to offset my loss, let's say that was true, and I bought those 10 shares back immediately. Now my cost basis on those 10 shares is $170 a share. If Palantir continues up and I now sell it at, let's just say $300 a share, I'm only going to have a gain of 130 points versus $7 to 300. Do you understand what I did? So don't think it's just so simple where you sell stocks to offset gains. You only sell stocks that have a loss in it to offset gains if you don't want to own those stocks ever again.
- [15:42]
Am I clear on that now? So I have one more Susie school for you today. And this lesson is about. We live in a day and age where scamming is rampant and you cannot be somebody who just sticks your head in the sand. And you don't check your statements, you don't check your accounts, you don't check your credit reports, you don't look at your credit score. You cannot do that in a day and age like this. You have to freeze your credit reports. You have to do things that protect you. And by the way, I'm just going to say, and to that end, come March next year, I will have something that will seriously protect you and would have protected you in this particular situation. But you're going to have to wait for March to see that. Okay? And here's how it goes. From Cheryl. I've been a fan of yours and always have been grateful for your advice and wisdom. In 2022, I purchased two I bonds. With all the financial fraud, I check all my investments at the beginning of every month. On July 4, I was unable to access my Treasury Direct account as I never received an otp. And an OTP is what? Once you go to sign in, they send you a one Time password. And that's the password that you use. Again, Treasury Direct is a governmental institution and most people who want to buy Series I bonds, inflation bonds, you have to buy them through Treasury Direct and have a Treasury Direct account. Okay? So you would imagine, wouldn't you, that they were safe and sound. Please listen to this story. To make a long story short, someone changed the bank linked to my account and requested a distribution which was completed on July 8. No one from Treasurydirect verified that it was me and my account of just $11,000 was emptied. Even worse, my account was still locked. I called repeatedly with no adequate response and did not find out about this fraud until TD sent an email to my secondary email in October. This was July, now it's October because I don't always check that email. Oh, I will do it daily now. I only found out about it at that time. I called at 8 o' clock in the morning asking to speak with a fraud specialist and I was told that the only communication available to me was to respond to the email when I continue to argue with the person that I was talking to. Her name was Rose, by the way. She hung up on me. I did respond to the email, But I googled TreasuryDirect complaints and found many similar stories. Every person posting about these problems had their money sent to a checking account at pathword national association.
- [19:15]
And it goes on and on. Now, I obviously wrote Cheryl back a variety of things that she should do and she should try. But the first thing I want to say to all of you, if any of you are connected with pathword national association or if you have any account that does business with them, I am warning you right here and right now, I would change that account. If you look them up, if you Google them and everything, you can see all the complaints that they have against them. But the reason that I'm telling you this story is that you would think that the money that you have in your TreasuryDirect account is the safest of them all.
- [20:04]
Obviously it may be, but it may not be. So it wouldn't kill you to check it all the time, meaning at least once a month, twice a month. And pay attention to your secondary email addresses just in case treasurydirect happens to contact you. All right? Do I think that's enough for Susie School today? I think I do. So what did we learn? We learned that friendship is not a financial plan. We learned that you only sell stocks at a loss to offset gains when you no longer want to own those stocks. And we learned that we have to be on top of all of our accounts, everywhere we have an account and continuously check our credit reports, our credit scores, our statements, and make sure that everything is as it should be. So Until Thursday when Ms. Travis joins us again for another Ask KT and Susie and me thing, there's only one thing that I want you to know when it comes to your money. And it's this people first, then money, then things. Now you stay safe. We are strong we are wise we will not apologize we are human here we will thrive Together we will rise we're the faith and everything it takes we are strong we are wise Together we will rise.
- [21:52]
Hi everybody. Susie O Here and it's open enrollment time at all corporations. So I hope you are checking all of your benefits so that you know you are up to date with what you need. But I have to tell all of you there is one other benefit that I know all of you need and your corporations need to offer. And it comes from a company that I helped co found over 5 years ago by the name of Secure Save. So whether you're an employee or an employer, I want you to go to securesave.com Suzy S U Z E and take a look at what I have for you there. I promise you you're gonna like it.
- [22:42]
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All right now, neither Suze Orman Media nor Suze Orman is acting as a Certified Financial Planner Advisor, a Certified Financial Analyst, an economist, cpa, accountant or lawyer. Neither Suze Orman Media nor Suze Orman make any recommendations as to any specific securities or investments. All content contained in this podcast is for informational and general purposes only and does not constitute financial, accounting or legal advice. You should consult your own tax, legal and financial advisors regarding your particular situation. Neither Suze Orman Media nor Suze Orman accepts any responsibility for any losses which may arise from accessing or or reliance on information in this podcast and to the fullest extent permitted by law, we exclude all liability for loss damages, direct or indirect, arising from the use of this information. The must have documents discussed in this podcast are legal documents created by a lawyer and distributed by Hay House. Thanks for listening.