Boy Disease and How Suze Orman Helps, Lesson #1 — Trying to Be Like Donald Trump Cannot Be the Answer.
I’m a guy and I suffer from boy disease from time to time. I also enjoy moments when I am able to see through the fog.
There’s nothing wrong with the male personal finance advisors. They have their place. They do a job that needs to be done and they do it well.
There’s a reason, though, why a good God created men and women and then implanted in them a drive to overcome the frustrations and figure out a way to live together in peace. Men as a general rule possess access to some pieces of the puzzle and women as a general rule possess access to other pieces of the puzzle.
If almost all personal finance advisors were women, many of us would sense that there was something lacking. Most of us sense that there is something lacking in the money advice we hear in a world in which almost all personal finance advisors are men. That’s a big reason why Suze Orman is so successful. She brings a different perspective to the table.
Boy Disease and How Suze Orman Helps, Lesson #2 — Deciding Whether to Pay Off the Mortgage is Not a Numbers Exercise.
A good number of years back, I used to listen to a radio program dealing with personal finance questions that was hosted by Bruce Williams. It was a good show. But it used to make me a little nuts when someone would ask whether it was a good idea to make extra mortgage payments. I rented at the time, so the question had no personal significance. But the patness of the answer he always gave annoyed me. He would always ask what the interest rate was and then roll off numbers purporting to show whether paying off the mortgage was a good idea or not.
The idea was that, if the mortgage called for a low interest rate, it was dumb to pay off the mortgage. The bank had given you a good deal and you should take advantage of it to the fullest.
No!
The numbers side of things is indeed part of what you need to think about when deciding whether to reduce your mortgage or pay it off entirely. Bruce Williams was bringing value to the table. But even in those days, when I was not exactly what you would call money smart, I could see that the advice he was giving was too narrow.
Bruce Williams suffered from boy disease. We boys love to play with numbers, heaven help us all. Money topics invite this sort of thing, of course. Dollars can be counted. Most money questions can be reduced to numbers exercises by those who feel more comfortable talking about numbers than that icky emotions stuff. I bet Bruce Williams smiled every time the “Should I make extra payments on the mortgage?” question turned up. He knew the answer to that one. He had answered it so many times that he could work through the calculations in his head.
He knew half of the answer. That’s the truth of the matter.
Suze Orman often wears a black leather jacket on the photos taken for her book covers. Is that cool or what?
Boy Disease and How Suze Orman Helps, Lesson #3 — Feel the Tension.
Henry Higgens had it made before that Eliza Doolittle individual showed up with her large brown eyes and that song about how having lots of chocolate to eat would be heavenly. He was living a boy’s dream. He had no one running about trying to improve him. He didn’t need women.
Except he did, right? It’s always the way, isn’t it? Our apartments get too messy for us to continue to kid ourselves that we are okay by ourselves and we dial somebody’s telephone number. We complain about what follows, but we knew when we dialed the number where things were likely headed.
We like the tension. We need the tension. The point of life is to work through these sorts of tensions.
This site is entitled “PassionSaving.com.” There’s a tension between those two words. Passion is the girl word, saving is the boy word. One is emotion, one is practical. One is exciting, one is grounded. One takes you who knows where, one is predictable.
Girls aren’t better than boys and boys aren’t better than girls. Both are better when they are working out the tension that comes up when they are placed in the same room and told to figure things out. Guy money advice works but it does not work as well as guy money advice mixed up together with girl money advice.
Lots of my titles are like that. With “Retire Different!”, “Retire” is the boy word and “Different!” is the girl word. With “Practical Dreamers,” “Practical” is the boy word and “Dreamers” is the girl word. With “Investing for Humans,” “Investing” is the boy word and “Humans” is the girl word.
The titles are like that because life is like that. A radio station that played only Bruce Springstein would get boring fast. A radio station that played only Joni Mitchell would get boring fast. We need to see more Joni Mitchell lyrics in our personal finance books.
Suze Orman has written a few such lyrics. Good for her.
Boy Disease and How Suze Orman Helps, Lesson #4 — Playing “Cowboys and Indians” Can Get You Killed.
One of my favorite stories about kids is about a mother who didn’t want her little boy playing war games. It was okay for him to play with dolls. She instructed all the relatives not to buy him guns. One day she caught him holding a Barbie as if it were a gun and pretending to shoot his little brother with it and then blow off the smoke sent up by the gunpowder.
I don’t think there is ever going to be a world in which boys don’t play with guns. I think that runs deep. I don’t think that you can learn the answer to every personal finance question by playing “Cowboys and Indians,” however. For some of them, you need to play dress-up. For some of them, you need to play school. For some of them, you need to pretend you’re Patty Duke and that dancing the Hot Potato makes you lose control.
Suze Orman knows how to dance the Hot Potato, I presume. Bruce Williams, I’m not so sure about. Donald Trump, I’m not so sure about. Charlie Munger can tell a joke good enough that I would repeat it to friends, but I’m not sure that even Charlie Munger can dance as mean a Hot Potato as Suze Orman. It’s possible that I’m wrong about that one. Many have made the mistake of underestimating Charlie Munger.
Suze Orman is in the possession of a good bit of money. I read somewhere that she invests it in ultra-safe stuff. That makes sense, right? Why take chances when you already have more than you are ever going to need?
How many boys can bring themselves to publicly acknowledge investing in sissy asset classes? Donald Trump has more than he will ever need too. He’s always out to make that next score, though, isn’t he? Boy disease.
Boy Disease and How Suze Orman Helps, Lesson #5 — It’s Not the Meat, It’s the Motion.
It’s mostly boys who post to discussion boards. Boy are too loud and girls are too smart. “My portfolio is bigger than yours!” “No, mine is bigger!” Too much of that, and the Cool Girls move along to a more promising spot.
The truth is, discussion boards were made for girls. What is it that girls like to do most? Talk, right? (Are there any generalizations that I have failed to include at this point?) Discussion boards are for talking, right? So what’s the problem?
The problem is the boys. We had lots of girls participating in the early days of the Motley Fool board. That was when we talked about “soft side” stuff. Calling that stuff the “soft side” of early retirement was an insult that some of the Dumb Boys came up with. We were talking about the real stuff, the difficult stuff, the important stuff. We would still be talking about that stuff if some of the Dumb Boys hadn’t freaked.
The Dumb Boys at the Vanguard Diehards board are always bringing up the matter of “credentials.” They seem to think that there’s some kind of badge that you can put on that makes all of your money advice work. The Cool Girls know that anyone who has money knows something about what to do with money and that those who are are always holding out their badge are probably doing it because they fear that they don’t have what it takes and are about to be found out.
Girls take in information in different ways than boys. The girls’ ways are better, in my assessment. I think that Suze Orman can teach us something about those better ways that even a boy who graduated from the most famous school and who manages the biggest fund in the universe cannot.
Boy Disease and How Suze Orman Helps, Lesson #6 — Bad Savers Are Not Bad People.
Effective Savers are often like reformed smokers. We all want to know how they did what they did. We just cannot stand the judgmental tone that they adopt when talking about it.
This is a pet peeve of mine. If you save well, consider yourself blessed. It gives you a big edge. It doesn’t make you morally superior.
Girls as a rule (there are lots and lots of exceptions, to be sure) are better able to show sympathy when trying to help those who need help. Too many boys struggle with this. My sense is that they see life as a battleground (we need that perspective at times, to be sure) and feel that they have to make use of any edge they come to possess.
There are people who can listen to what Suze Orman has to say who cannot listen to what boy personal finance advisors have to say because of the way they say it.
Boy Disease and How Suze Orman Helps, Lesson #7 — The First Step in a Learning Process is Admitting You Don’t Know Something.
Boys have a difficult time asking a stranger for directions. It’s a cliché observation. It became a cliché because there are so many cases in which it is so.
Is the ability to appear vulnerable before others an important credential for a personal finance advisor?
Yep.
That’s one more basket for Suze Orman and the rest of the Girl Money Advisors Team.
Boy Disease and How Suze Orman Helps, Lesson #8 — Slower Is Better.
There was a fellow who wrote me to tell me that my site stinks because there are too many words and not enough direct instructions as to what he is to do to win financial freedom early in life.
He has a point. I’m not saying different. I have a thing going with words and everybody has limited time to devote to this money stuff.
I’m distrustful of the seemingly unquenchable desire for money “tips,” however. The problem with tips is that they go down easy but they don’t stick to your insides. You learn more about life reading one novel of substance than you do working your way through ten of those magazines with all the dizzy pages filled with tips and quizzes and sidebars. Any learning experience brought on by spending time with that sort of thing doesn’t last.
I hope that, as we see more women money advisors, we will see a greater willingness to go deep in our explorations of why at some times we know just what to do with our money and at other times we feel like a klutz on a first date.
It’s not a man who is the most successful money advisor alive today on Planet Earth. It’s Suze Orman. You go, girl!