访谈录 Interview 2007-03-05&07, 美女与金钱

This morning on Today's Money, Women and Finances, get this, women bring in a half or more of the incoming of the majority of the US households and they run 40 percent of this country's businesses. But 9 in 10 of us feel insecure when it comes to finances. Suze Orman hosts her own show on CNBC, now she's out with a new book called Woman and Money, owning the power to control your destiny. Suze, good morning to you. What is it with our gender 1 we are multi-taskers. We run our homes, many of us run businesses or work outside the home, we are great with the kids, we help our husbands, we are close with our friends when it comes to money, we are idiots, most of us, what is it?

It's not that we are idiots. It's really not that, here is the problem when women earn money, what they do with the money that they get is different that when a man does with it. So I’m not talking about investing here, I’m not talking about paying off bills, and things like that. We think when we get money, the role of money is to give it to others, it's to support our parents, our children, our friends, we think that if we use it on ourselves, save for our futures 2 that we are actually denying our kids and everybody what they deserved?

So it order for us that a healthy relationship, yes, with money, yes. The first thing we need to do is to realize that quote “you’re not on sale!” What does that mean?

When you are a working full-time 3, full-time mother, you're taking care of your parents. How much time do you have to volunteer? But women don't know how to say no, so we have put ourselves on sale and part of this book shows you how you take yourself off the sales rack once and for all.

So we don't really value ourselves and all our services?

Yes, and here is the problem. When you undervalue who you are, the world undervalues what you do and when you undervalue what you do, the world undervalues who you are and that's why we don't own the power to control our destiny because we don't value ourselves.

So help me out of here. What's one thing that we could do just to gain financial security, for there's only one thing, what would you recommend the next year?

I would recommend every woman needs to have a savings 4 account that she can call her own. So many women call in to my own show and they say Suzie, I don't have a penny saved for myself, they ask me about their children, but not themselves.

But what if, er, you, for example you are a homemaker; you don't have a job, where can you get the money to open up the account?

So, every woman, I refuse to believe that we cannot find at least 50 dollars a month. I'm not asking for 500 dollars a month, I‘m not asking for 10 dollars a day, I'm asking for just 50 dollars a month. So the goal of this book is to turn women to valuing themselves from savers into investors 5 so that we can have the ability to own the power to control our destiny.

One of the things you do in your show is you take phone calls, yes , so we thought we do that here, we check with average community. We gotta a couple of people on the phone who have questions for you, first caller, Stephanie from Cottonwood, Alabama, Stephanie, are you there?

I'm 31, my husband is 32, we've been married for 8 years and we have 2 children, age at 5 and 6, I work part-time, he works full-time and we want to know how to start saving for retirement 6 now while we live in paycheck to paycheck?

The best place to save for retirement if your income is under, let’s say, 100, for you, 156, 000 dollars a year would be a Roth IRA. Roth IRAs are the best way to go for many reasons if you work for a place however, that does have a 401k plan that matches your contribution you put in a dollar, they give you 15 cents. I don't care if you don't have a penny to your name, you can't afford to miss that kind of return on your money. It's not the matter of 15 percent return on your money, just do it automatically you won't even miss it, listen, the less you bring in, the less you spend, the more you make the more you spend, so if you just put a little away, you will see that money will be there for you.

Ok. Good luck, good luck, Stephanie, thank you, and we also have a call from Beth from Peoria, Illinois. Hi, Beth.

My husband and I are trying to get back on our fee from credit card debts and we wanna know which is best, to pay all the credit cards off a little at a time or to pay them off one at a time?

Here is how you do it. You line them up highest interest rate to lowest interest rate. You'll pay the maximum amount of money you have available to put towards those credit cards to the highest interest rate card. You'll pay the minimum and all the other cards. Once the highest interest rate card is paid off, you take the amount you'll pay there plus the minimum you'll pay towards the second highest interest rate. Do it fair and keep rolling it down. The more you pay off your debt, the higher you FICO score goes. That's the credit score that all of you have. The higher your FICO score, the lower your interest rate, the better your life. That's how you do it.

Wonderful! Yeah, here you go, all right. Good luck!

Thank you.

You make it sound pretty easy, Suze, you really do, just don't be afraid of money.

Don't be, well, Here is the thing, don't be afraid of who you are.

Suze Orman, thank you very much, I have good feeling you know exactly who you are. And the book is Women and Money, owning the power to control your destiny.