 From the Cosmopolitan hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's The Cube, covering Koopa Inspire 2019. Brought to you by Koopa. Welcome to The Cube, Lisa Martin at Koopa Inspire on the ground in Las Vegas, and I'm super, super, super excited to welcome Susie Orman to The Cube. Susie, host of the Women and Money podcast. How much money have you lost? Oh, I don't gamble. Girlfriend. No way. I do spend too much money at Starbucks every day and I felt I needed to confess that to you. Oh, God. But I know a million dollars in 40 years. I'm going to curb my habit, Susie. All right. There we go. All right. I'm confessing it to you on camera. You have been forgiven. Oh, thank you. So, love listen to your podcast. Watch your show on CNBC for a long time. Women and Money is something that, obviously, as a woman in technology, is really imperative to me. It's something that really captures my attention. The pay gap is so obvious, has been for so long. But one of the things that I always think when I hear you give advice, whether you're at a tech conference like we are now or anywhere else, is so much of its common sense that as humans, we just don't want to hear because it's easy to ignore it. Here's the thing is that women in particular have so much on their plate. Most of them have their parents they're taking care of, their husband or their spouse, their children, and they're bringing in an income. So, they don't have a second to breathe. They can't, like, all the way around. And the truth is their husbands don't know anything more about money than they do. Men are financial fakers. I've always said that. So, women are really, they want to know more, but they're really overloaded right now. So, you've got to give it to them in a way that they can digest it when they can. One of the things, being in software and tech for now 14 years, you know, when you're in a room, whatever meeting you're in, you think, I don't understand that. But you think, I don't want to be the one to ask a stupid question so you don't ask. And it's sort of the same thing in the financial situation. Somebody might be explaining something to you and something to me recently and I'm like, I don't understand it. But then I default, well, they're the expert. No. And you're saying, trust your guys. You've got to trust yourself more than you trust others. You know, when I was seeing clients, you know what I used to do? First of all, it was mandatory that if you were married, you came in with your spouse. Now, it was normally back then a male and a fee of male. Now, my greatest thing is it's a woman and a woman and a man and a man. That's another thing. And the woman would go to the bathroom. Because our meetings were long. And while she was at the bathroom, I would say the most complicated to her husband, that made no sense on any level. And I would say, do you understand this? I do. I go, so you know if you do this and then this, this will be the result. Got it. Okay. His wife would come back and sit down. And I would then say to him, all right, explain to your wife what I just explained to you. And he couldn't do it. So then the conversation was, why did you pretend to understand something that there was nothing to understand about? What is that? So you really have to say, I don't get it. And here's the thing. Money is so easy. Money is not complicated. It really is not. Wall Street wants you to think it's complicated so that you go ahead and hire a financial advisor, a bank. You can do this. You can do this. But everybody is so afraid of it, they just, you know, and they don't want to deal with it because they're so afraid. Or even if we do take that step and start working with a financial planner, there's that, I call it conscious incompetence. They know what they're doing. They don't. I'm going to let them handle it. They don't. They don't. They don't. I would not work with a financial advisor that wasn't at least 15 years into it. 15, okay. 15, could the past 10 years, the market's gone straight up. You could have been a monkey and made money in the stock market the past 10 years. You want somebody who went through the recession, who's been through it all. And they've seen the ups. They've seen the downs. And now they can keep their calm. Don't give me a 10-year track record. Give me a 20-year track record. Give me a 15-year. Start with the year that the markets crashed. And how did you do? So if you don't have an advisor that's been through all of that, danger. Number two, if they talk to you about an insurance product, universal life, whole life, variable life insurance, I'm here to tell you that is don't ever, ever mix insurance and investments. You want to buy life insurance policy? Fine. Buy a term life insurance policy. Do not buy an insurance policy that's also an investment. Crazy out there. I just heard your podcast on women and money just the other day about mistakes to avoid. So of course I listened to it. I was shocked. You were saying nurses and teachers are too... Are targeted. Yes. And there was one woman who invested, I think it was like 75 bucks a month for... 20 years. And only made $4,000. Yeah. And it's, I had one yesterday that wrote in that has been doing $200 a month for 20 years. And they have no money. They have like, it's anyway, just, here's the thing. If you don't know what to do, let me tell you what not to do. Okay. Do not buy a whole life universal or variable life insurance policy. Do not buy a variable annuity within a retirement account. You know, do not buy loaded mutual funds that have a letter A or B on it. Just those few things alone. Great. So getting back to women and money, women in technology, you know, like I mentioned a minute ago, the pay gap, we all know it. How do we, how do women, how do you advise us to, to find that inner voice, to find that power, to ask for the better job, the promotion, the better opportunities? How do we find that? You have to make those that you are dependent on a paycheck for dependent upon you. When I started the Susie Orman show at CNBC, all right, so 2001, they offered me was like, I'm not doing this show and signing for five years for whatever this little amount of money is. And since I didn't need money, it was like, I'll do it for free. I did that show the very first year and I did not make one penny. Really? One year it became the number one show on CNBC, of all CNBC produced shows. Now CNBC needed me. Now CNBC paid me what I wanted. Not what I needed, what I wanted. And I got what I wanted because I came from a place of power. So women, we have to put ourselves in a position where you're powerful with your own money. And when you're powerful and you don't need that pay raise, you don't need that job promotion. You want it, but you don't need it. You'll get it because they need you. So when you make somebody dependent upon you, you become valuable to them. And if they don't value you, then get out of there. That's great advice because oftentimes people will think, well, they can just replace me. Or we think, I'm not replaceable. So then, okay, so then what if that happens? What do I do? I'm going to be always prepared that that can happen. Because that can happen if there's a downsizing, if there's a downturn in the economy. That's why I always say in eight month emergency fund, don't have any debt. Put yourself in a situation that if anything were to happen, you get sick, you're in a car accident, and you can't work, it's okay. It's okay. When you come from that place, then magic starts to happen. When you come from a place of, oh please, my paycheck isn't in another two days. I need it. It's another two days so that I keep a car forever. You know, I have a car that's now going on eight years old. I keep my cars 10 to 13 years. I don't get a new car just because I can. What is that about? So live below your means, but within your needs. Only purchase needs, not wants. And get as much pleasure out of saving as you do spending. Those three things alone will absolutely change your life. So we're at a tech conference. Let's talk about tech and how do we, we're bombarded with ads all the time. We're in Instagram and there's, oh, there's that cute dress I wanted, click. And I don't have any accountability for it because all I did was tap something. I didn't see that transaction go through my bank account. How do you see technology? How do we utilize it for actually getting better control over our own financial freedom and not letting it... Yeah, I never, ever, because I'm on the internet all the time. If an ad comes in, I immediately turn it off. I never click on an ad that has come to me. I only purchase things, and I can purchase anything I want, but I only purchase things that I go after and I look at it. Then I put it in the cart and I don't buy it. Think about it. And I think about it. I really want it. It was an impulse, whatever. But you know what I found out? When I put it in the cart, a day later, I get something from them with a discount code. So if I just waited, I'm going to get it for cheaper. And so I always though, because it's so easy, put it in your cart and just wait a day or two before you push, yet you won't even remember it's there. Right. Well, it's a little bit of self-control. I think that's just that opening up to... and Oprah's other friend, I know your friend's with Oprah, Brene Brown taught me, vulnerability is awesome. It's not weakness. It's the courage to say to your financial planner, I don't get this. Yeah. Or to your point, if this person doesn't have 15 years experience and they haven't been through the tumult of the economy, I'm sorry, I'm sure you're a great person. I need to go somewhere else because this is my money for the rest of my life. You know, there's a law that I live by which is it's better to do nothing than something you do not understand. Now, I apply it to other things in life. Like I'm really into being a boat captain and fishing, but I don't go places in my boat that I don't understand how the waters work, where the ledges are. I don't venture out because I don't want to get in trouble. So it's better to do nothing than something you do not understand and just do something else that you understand. And again, one of the things I love about your advice is it's so simple. But I think as a society, we're so governed by technology. It's our alarm clock in the morning. The first thing we do is check email or Instagram or something on dot com or listening to podcasts. It's so easy to have a shoppable moment anywhere. Yes, it's probably just a whole lot easier as time and artificial intelligence and everything takes over. It's going to be really easy. So the question is, do you want to have things or do you want to have money? What do you want? Yeah, because you say, what is it? People first. People first than money than things. Tell me about that. The reason that I did that, it's a long story as to how that came about. But when I said people first, I always meant women. You. Do not put everybody else in front of you. Don't go buying gifts for all your friends and everybody when you have absolutely no money. Put yourself first for once. Next is money. You want more money in your bank account than things that you have in your closet. So make your priorities. Those are your priorities. Put yourself first, then your money, and then if you have those things together, then if you want to buy things, okay. I love it. People first than money than things. So you've been doing this for so long. And before we went live, I was asking you, how do you not clunk people's heads together? Because sometimes it's like, what? But you're saying these are the same problems that persist over and over because people don't know. Well, two things it shows you that money is not that complicated. That people still ask the same questions over and over again. There aren't all these little gadgets and these little widgets and these things. It's usually Roth 401K, traditional 401K, Roth IRA, 401K, credit card debt first, or student loans. They're the same over and over again. But each question to that person is the most important question in the world to that person. And that one person is important to me. Because if I can save or help one person change their life, that one person can go on and change this whole world. Never know who that one person is going to turn out and be. You're right. And so, I mean, if I think back on it, Fred Hasbrook, who is the man who gave me money when I worked at the Buttercup Bakery. The Buttercup Bakery, which isn't there anymore. Right? And that one man who gave me $2,000 with all these other people, those actions to me created me. And I've changed millions of lives with people, with the information that I've given people. They actually changed their own life. But so one action can change a whole world. I love that. You never know who that person will be. You don't know. You never know. Well, Suzy, when are we going to do our next show together? This has been so much fun. I don't know. We have to come back here. Where are you out of? Palo Alto, California. Palo Alto. Well, we come back there. All right. All right. Well, good. Thank you, Suzy. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Bye-bye. For Suzy Orman, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you for watching The Cube at Koopa Inspired 19.