← Suze Orman's Women & Money (And Everyone Smart Enough To Listen)
Suze Orman's Women & Money (And Everyone Smart Enough To Listen)
You Have The Ability To Thrive
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Do you know the difference between identity theft protection and scam protection? You better, everybody, because many of you think that you are protected. But I'm here to tell you, if you fall victim to an online scam, you are not going to get your money back unless you have the ultimate scam protection. Go to Suziorman.com right now and check it out. Foreign. 2026. Welcome, everybody, to the Women and Money podcast. And everybody smart enough to listen today is Suzy School. So get out your little Suzy notebooks and get out some tissues as well. And you'll see why later, later on in this podcast. All right, a few things, however, that I want to say before I begin. Number one, don't forget to go to Suziorman.com and sign up for the live webinar on April 23rd. Fabulous. I want you all to be there. And by the way, while you are there, why not check out the ultimate scam protection. I'm telling you, big difference, everybody, between identity theft protection and scam protection. So many of you think that you are being protected against money being lost and they're going to give you your money back. You are not if all you have is identity theft protection. I created a program that was all about scam protection so that when you lose money online, guess what? They will replace it. This is with Nord. They will replace it up to $100,000. And yes, there's also identity theft protection in it, cyber protection. It's all in there. But the main reason that you want to buy it is for scam protection. Got that, everybody? Next, let's just talk about the market here for a little bit. Things are calming down. They just are. All right, we'll see what happens. Oil has come down. Certain things have been doing absolutely great. By the way, Semis smh, which I asked all of you to buy a long time ago. It has been skyrocketing. Q. Q. Q.s are doing okay. There are things that are doing okay. There are things that are not. But if you are invested properly, you will be just fine. And when I say properly, you don't have all of your money in one or two or three seriously speculative stocks. Now, earlier yesterday, yesterday morning, actually, I got an email from a friend who I haven't heard from in a long time, and I said, how are you? And she said, well, I'd be a whole lot better if the stock market would go back up. And I wrote her back and I said, are you kidding me? Do you remember all the way back during the dot com, back in 2000 right in there. Do you remember when Amazon went from $100 a share down to 5? It declined approximately 97% and became one of the greatest stocks of all time. Can you imagine if you sold back then? Can you even begin to imagine? But it wasn't just Amazon. It was Apple. Apple has gone up and down and up and down. Do you remember in 2008, 2009, it went down 60%. Do you remember that? And people were calling, saying, just sell. Just, just sell. I need to get out. I need to get out. I want you to write this saying down. You don't make money simply buying great companies. Did you write that down? All right, you make money surviving them. Surviving them. You have to just get through this this time. And this time is not easy, trust me. I have some serious losses of gains on the books now. I didn't say losses, because many of the stocks that I bought, I bought at very low prices. They went a whole lot higher than they are now. Some of them are down 100 points. But overall, I'm still up money. So haven't I said to all of you, look at what you have, not at what you could have had? My true advice to most of you right now is can you just stop looking at all. If you know that you have good quality stocks, stocks that people need, that they're going to be here, if you know that you have diversification or whatever it may be, and that you're not just all invested in one speculative area, can you just stop looking and maybe come back six months or a year from now, really? Because you will make a mistake, in my opinion, if you sell right now. Now, how do I know that? Because I made a mistake. Not now, but before. And let me tell you about it. All of us have emotions, and that includes me. And I had a serious position in Netflix. Let's just say I had 1,000 shares at the time. I bought it at 200, so that would have been $200,000. And I watched Netflix go from 200 to 300 to 400 to 600 to 700, almost up 900,000. Like I saw. I'm like going, oh, my God. And then it went down, and finally it's at $200 a share. And now I've had it. I sold because I couldn't take it anymore. And then over the next year or two or three, it essentially went back up to over $1,000 a share, split 10 for one, which is why it's now at $103 a share. But that would be worth $1,030 a share. I would be up an $800 profit. But, no, I couldn't deal with the pressure. I learned a great lesson then. I just did. Now, to my credit, that was also during the time, seriously, when I had gone through that major operation. I wasn't really thinking straight. I didn't know what my future held. And therefore, I made a decision that was not wise. I don't want you to make that same mistake. So again, I will repeat the main lesson of this part of the Suzy School, which is you don't just make money buying great companies. You make money surviving them. Surviving their ups, their downs, their ins and their outs. A great company is a great company and just put it away five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now. Just think about that. But today for me is a very special day, and I'm going to try to get through this with all of you. For those of you who don't know the story, let me just bring you back to July 21, 2020. And I had been having trouble. My right leg really wasn't working properly. It was kind of dragging a little. I couldn't really sign my name in books or whatever. I was having trouble doing just little things. So we decide, okay, let's go and get an MRI. And July 21st happens to be KT's birthday. And we were convinced since it was her birthday, that there was absolutely no way that we were going to get bad news. So she stayed in the car. I went in for my mri. Everybody was always so happy to see me because they like Susie Orman and they like knowing that they're taking care of me. And there I am having an mri. And in the middle of the mri, the machine stops. And all of a sudden, I hear my doctor, Dr. Satowitz, his voice come over the loudspeaker. Now, his office isn't even near where that MRI place is. And he says, susie, I need to come in and talk with you. I'm like, okay, now. And he comes in. They, you know, kind of scoop me out. You know how they move back and forth when you're in an mri? And he says, we have a problem. You have a tumor, and the tumor is blocking almost your entire spinal cord. We don't know how you're walking. We don't know why it hasn't busted, but this is a problem we need to deal with right here and right now. Well, I had the MRI image, and I sent it to my friend Ron Wahls, who is The CFO of Mass Gen General. And I sent it to him saying, is this serious? Is this true what they're saying? He calls me immediately and he says, susie, I need you to talk to somebody at 7:00 tomorrow morning. So I go, okay. And I call Ron and he has the head of all neurosurgery, all these doctors, Dr. Nino Chioki of Mass General Harvard, and puts him on the phone with me and he said, susie, I need you to listen to me. There are only one or two doctors in this entire world that can do this operation. You can't have somebody in Boca do it. You can't have somebody just anywhere do it. This is very serious and I need you to come here. And I have picked out the perfect, perfect doctor that I know can do this operation. KT and I didn't question it. We didn't think about it. And we got on a plane, a private plane that next morning and that now is July 22nd and we're on our way to Boston. We get off the plane, we get in the car, immediately take us. And they're waiting on the curb for me and they have a wheelchair for me. And I go, I can walk. It's like, no, you cannot walk. Any wrong move, your spinal cord, Suze Orman is going to snap. We get in there and they wheel us in. Now this is during COVID and they are not letting anybody in to the hospital. And KT is with me and thank God we were with Ron Wahls, head of the whole hospital. And he looks at everybody and says, this woman is coming in and she's not going to leave Susie's side. So KT was able to come in with me. It was on that day that I met Dr. Mike Groff for the very first time. And I loved him. We talked for an hour and a half. I have it all on my recorder. And I said to him, well, how dangerous is this operation? And he said, ah, maybe a seven, maybe an eight. Not a big deal. So KT and I were kind of relieved. We didn't think much about it. He said, but it's going to be at 6 o' clock tomorrow morning. We start, said, fine. So we went to a little hotel. They took us to this place that we were staying that's connected to the hospital. And we had the best dinner. We ate everything that was probably wasn't good for us. French fries, nachos, delicious. And we were like happy because we thought everything was going to be just fine. We then show up, they immediately take us in and Dr. Nino Kiocchi comes in and I'm going to post pictures of all of these people so you can see them on the Women and Money site, just so you know, on the community app. And he said, well, I'm going to be in there and I'm going to be watching Mike. I said, okay. And nobody said anything, but everybody was acting a little bit strange. And then the head anesthesiologist comes in and she's talking to me and she's saying, okay, there's going to be four or five of us in there. And I'm like, why so many anesthesiologists in there? And everything again is going smoothly. And now they start to wheel me in and I say goodbye to kt and she looks at KT just as we're going in. She says, kt, I just want to tell you something. It is very, very possible that Susie, when she comes out, she will be blind. And KT and I look at each other and we go, what are you talking about? And she said, but let's just see what happens. As she's wheeling me down this hall. I'm not under any drugs, anesthesia, anything at this point still, she's wheeling me down and she says, now you have to listen to me very closely, Susie. When I say wake up, you have to wake up. I said, okay. Now she's screaming at me. She said, don't say okay. When I say wake up, you have to, to wake up, say okay. She made me say that nine or ten times until I was screaming okay. Then they wheel me into the room and there's Dr. Grof along with 20 other surgeons. And I'm looking at everybody and I'm like, is this a party? And they were kind of still joking with me a little, but everybody was very light hearted. All right, 12 hours later, they're finally wheeling me out. They're having me in recovery for quite some time. And then finally there's kt. I get to see her. And okay. I mean, I have tubes everywhere, everything. And what ended up happening was that there was a tumor known as a schwannoma tumor that did cut off 99% of my spinal cord. And they were saying, you are a walking miracle. It should have snapped, but it didn't. They took out two of my discs in my neck, put in different ones, whatever they did. And now I'm back in the room and I'm actually feeling pretty good. Have a lot of drugs in me, everything. But I'm doing pretty well. And the Next morning, Ron Walls walks back into our room, we had a private room and says, I can't believe it. And I'm looking at him. I go, what can't you believe that you're sitting up, Susie? I said, yeah. And he said, and I can't believe that you're using your arms. Because I was using my arms. I said, yeah. And he said, and I think you're going to be able to walk. I said, well, yeah. And he said, essentially what he said to us was, Susie, you have to understand that this surgery was one of two things. It was either a life ending surgery, worst case, best case, it was definitely going to be a lifestyle or altering surgery. I said, what does that mean? And to put it bluntly, they honestly thought that if I came out alive that I would be either a quadriplegic or a paraplegic, but I definitely would not have use of my arms. Okay, now, over the next few months, I was on a walker. I got back to the island and Dr. Grof and Nino actually flew to the island and saw me. Nobody still wanted me to do much. I did my best to go on TV because it was the pandemic and it took like an hour to put on my jacket and cage. It was not a good three years for me on any level. But they came to the island, they saw me, and at that point my left arm was numb. But they were still like, we can't believe it, but we're so happy now. Why am I telling you this story today? And this is what's going to be hard for me. Over the years that this had happened, I became very, very close with Dr. Grof. He became my North Star. When anything wasn't going right, when the pain was more than I could tolerate, whenever anything, I would call him. And those calls turned it into a friendship where he came to the island again. He went fishing with Kolo. He came to our house here in Florida all the time for dinner. I mean, we were close. We talked at least once a month. I would talk to him about his money. He would talk to me about my health. Around right now, one year ago, and none of you knew this, but I did end up back in the hospital for a week. And I had called Mike and he was just about to go on a little trip with his family and we were supposed to talk on April 14th of last year. He said, don't worry, Susie. I'm going to talk about it. We'll get through this. It's okay. Don't worry. I'm here for you. And so everything was fine. Tests were coming back normal, all of that. Now it's April 12th, and it happened to be Passover and Easter, I believe, right at the same time. And Mike and his wife Joy, who was also a doctor, and his daughter Corinna and her boyfriend James, they were 25. And Jared, which was Mike's son, and his girlfriend Alexia, were all going to a Seder in upstate New York, in Kopaki, New York, to be exact. And they had called their other daughter, Annika, who's 18, and said, do you want to come? And she said, no, no, it's okay. I know all of you will be back tonight because we'll have Seder together, and we're going to celebrate Corinna's 25th birthday. So I'll just wait here and get everything ready for you. Well, on April 12th. Later that day, we got a call from one of the head doctors there, Linda, and she said, I have something I have to tell you. Now, KT and I are in the hospital room. We found out everything's okay with me, so you don't have to worry about that. And she said, susie, I have to tell you something. And I said, well, wait, let me put you on speakerphone so KT can hear it, too. And she said, mike was in an airplane accident, and he and his entire family were. Were killed. Now, Mike was an avid pilot. He had always piloted his own plane. It was one of his greatest joys in life to be a pilot. He could do helicopters. He could do all of it. And he had this plane that he just loved. Anyway, he was flying the plane that day with his whole family, and he missed the exit of where to land, and it was foggy, and he turned around and hit the side of a mountain, and all of them died on the spot. Can you just imagine? And to say that we cried and we cried is putting it mildly. Later that day, were sitting there and just so distraught, and the head neurologist of Boca and all these other neurology doctors came in with the results of my mri. I'm like, oh, don't tell me. What are you doing here? What do you need? And he said to me, he said, I just want to tell you something, Susie. Everything's fine, but I don't know what surgeon did this surgery on you, but I can tell you that man absolutely saved your life. He is the best we have ever seen. And if you ever talk to him, can you tell him that the staff here at Boca, the neurological staff, just can't even believe it. And I just looked at him as they all walked out. There were four of them. And obviously, Obviously, Mike wasn't going to be talking to me on Monday. Mike could never talk to me again. But the reason that I'm telling you this story is because it was one year ago today, one of the worst days of my life. That news was absolutely more devastating to me than the medical news that I got those years ago. It really was. But a few days later, after this happened, there was an online funeral and a funeral in Boston. And Annika, his daughter, who was 18 at the time, she was a senior in high school, she lost her father, her mother, her brother, her sister, their boyfriend and girlfriend. She lost her entire immediate family all in one swoop. She got up there by herself, and here's what she said. She said, I only wish that I was on the plane with them, and I'll never know why. I really wasn't. But I do know one thing. They would want me to be strong. They would want me to make them proud. They would want me to show the world that against all odds, you can survive, you can recover, you can smile again, and you can make it. I want you to think about that. I want you to think about that. Today, she's living with her aunts, uncles, grandparents. She's okay. She's in college. And she seems to be doing exactly what she said she would be doing. She's making them proud. And she's learning how to thrive against all odds and all losses. Now, I'm also telling you that for a reason, this story, I'm telling you that because I just want you to think about this. When you get so upset about the markets going down, when you get so upset about the things that are going crazy in this world, when you get upset about things that can be changed, can be helped, can be brought back, I just want you to remember that this One girl, Anika, 18 years old, lost everything, and she now has the strength to go on. So all of you that suffer a serious loss, I hope you can take a little bit from this story, a little bit from Annika, and go on. Go on with strength and faith, knowing you have the ability to thrive again. You can do it. You have to do it. You have no other choice. So, Mike and family, I miss you so much. So much. That's all I can say. So until next week, there's only one thing I want you to remember, and that's never forget. We all have the ability to thrive.