Today, Suze Orman may be known as the confident, no-nonsense, financial powerhouse that she is—but she wasn’t always that way.
It was the late 1990s and with one hugely successful book already under her belt, publishing houses were fighting for the contract of her next best-seller.
The bidding war for publishing rights to “The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom” soon reached $800,000. However, rather than waiting to see how far the offers would climb, Orman insisted on ending it.
“What are you talking about? This book is going to go to a million and a half,” her bewildered literary agent said.
But an adamant Orman responded: “If somebody pays me that much money to write a book, I’m gonna get sick to my stomach. You choose which publisher you want to go with. But I don’t want more than $800,000.”
Orman says if she could go back in time she would have let the bidding rack up to millions, but looking back, she tells Fortune: “I didn’t think I was worth it – I wasn’t a writer. I was a finance person.”
How Orman found her voice
Now Orman, who went on to publish a total of 10 New York Times’ best-sellers and star in her own show on CNBC before most recently co-founding Securesave, knows her value.
“I know it big time,” she insists.
It all started in 1998 when she was offered a spot on the Oprah Winfrey Show to talk about the spiritual side of divorce on the back of a chapter in her book The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom titled “Practical and spiritual steps so you can stop worrying.”
Orman is indeed religious, but she felt strongly that this wasn’t her area of expertise.
“That is not me,” she told the producer of the show, Katy Davis. “Davis said nobody has ever refused to come on The Oprah Winfrey Show. I said, ‘Well, now somebody has.’”
Despite the shock of those around her, she says she stuck to her decision. “That’s when I was like, no, I know what I think and that’s what I’m going to follow.”
But the moment she truly found her voice came just months later when she was sitting in a “big meeting” with publisher Random House about the title of her third book, The Courage to be Rich.
“They said, that’s not a good book title,” Orman claims—a statement that she says prompted her to storm out and quit working with the company.
Fortune has contacted Random House for comment.
“They have absolutely no understanding about money. It doesn’t take courage to be poor. Anybody can be poor. It’s easy to be poor. It takes courage to open up your bills, face your debt and face your mistakes, that takes courage,” she told her manager at the time. “Break my contract. I refuse to write a book for them.”
In the end, Riverhead Books published the book using her title of choice in 1999, The Courage to be Rich went on to become a New York Times best-seller, and Orman wound up on The Oprah Show 29 times. The experience taught her the importance of knowing (and owning) your opinion.
How to know your worth
While Orman knows her exact worth—she sold 12,000 tickets every three minutes for her tour in South Africa alone—she measures it more holistically.
“You know your worth when you know your own thoughts,” she says. “When you keep asking everybody, ‘What do you think?’ and you’re constantly looking outside for what other people think or their approval you do not know your own worth.”
“I don’t ask anybody anything, I know what I think,” she adds defiantly as she progressively grows louder and more animated on the Zoom call. “I don’t give a damn what other people think of me… Because I know who I am and I like who I am.”
Orman suggests viewing your finances as a reflection of how organized and responsible you are—which can also help evaluate your value at work.
“If your money is a chaotic mess, that means you are a chaotic mess because your money can’t do anything without you—you’re the one who gets a paycheck, you’re the one who invests it, you’re the one who saves it, you’re the one who spends it,” she adds.
Orman suggests putting time aside to assess how much money you have coming in and going out, but mostly, how much debt is looming over your shoulder because, she says, it renders you “powerless”.
Without financial freedom, it’s almost impossible to stand your ground and therefore know your self-worth, she says.
“If your money is totally in order, then you should understand that you’re probably more powerful than you think you are.”
