Podcast Episode - Nooo! Don’t Do That!

For Suze School today, Suze talks about why it’s so important to not just invest in a single category and why having a diverse portfolio will help you be more financially secure.  Plus, Suze talks about some recent internet scams, an update on the “Trump Account” and more.

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Podcast Transcript:

Suze: August 17, 2025. Welcome everybody to the Women and Money podcast, as well as everybody smart enough to listen. Before we begin, we have to talk about this day because today is a really, really important day. It happens to be Colo's 46th birthday.

And he is in Columbia celebrating with his family, his spouse Annie, his two dogs, Toby and Mia, and thank God he didn't have to return to close up this house cause the hurricane was coming this way cause it's decided to go north and hopefully not hit anybody. But it is his birthday, so Colo, honest to God, you know how much we love you, but you always know how much KT loves you.

But I really want you to know how much I love you and I appreciate you. I know I'm not as loving and cuddly as KT is. I'm a little bit more formal, but deep down inside, I love you tons. All right, so happy, happy birthday to you, and we'll see you one week from today. All right.

Next, I want to talk about scammers.

There has been a scammer on the Women and Money community app under the name of "Suzë" with my picture, but two little dots above the "e." First of all, everybody, he has or she has been blocked. They have gotten rid of. We have the authorities hopefully going after them to find them.

However, I just want to say once again you have to be smarter than that. You have to know that I'm not going to say, hey, let's talk about it on Signal or whatever the scammer was asking you all to do. If I'm going to contact you, I'm gonna contact you personally in response to an email that you sent into ask Suze podcast at gmail.com.

And I will answer you there if I'm going to answer you. If I really want to speak to you, chances are I'm going to ask you somehow to give me your phone number or here's my phone number. Let's talk on the phone.

And sometimes when you don't really believe it's me, but I really need to talk to you, I will say on this podcast, listen, Peggy, that was me who wrote you last week, so please feel free to answer me. You're not being scammed.

However, I do want to make another announcement to that. This is rampant right now. If you're somebody like me or Keith Fitz-Gerald or anybody that gives out financial advice, it's very easy to be able to say, come on, invest with us, to scam you by pretending that they're us.

People write these articles and it looks like I was interviewed on CNN. Seems like a totally legit article to me, yet I never gave it, and it's a total scam. That's number two.

Number three. And I think this is an important thing, and it has to do with the Trump account.

Now last week I gave a total breakdown of the Trump account, and that was in the third edition of the tax changes in the bill that was passed in July. OK? And the more research I do on it, I have to tell you I actually don't think that it's as good of a deal as maybe I once thought.

And one of the reasons I think that is because I can't get agreement as to how that money will be taxed when it's withdrawn. Now I gave you last week my version and how I really believed it was to be taxed.

All these other people are starting to say, oh no, no, at 18 it turns into like an IRA, and any money that you pull out is going to be taxed as ordinary income, including the money that you put in every single year.

And because I can't get clarification on that from anywhere, I have to tell you I'd probably like let's put a hold on it for right now. Cause in the long run, really, I'd rather see you do a Roth IRA for your child and where you could fund it, but to do that, obviously your child has to be working, so you have to get around that.

Or to just open a regular investment account for the child or put it all in your name knowing it's for the child, and that at a certain age you can give it to them.

So right now I have to tell you I've changed my mind on that. There just seems like there's just too many things that aren't making sense and in disagreement how it really works. And when I can't get a specific answer and one professional tells me one thing and another tells me another, I just don't do it.

Now with that said, if you're going to have a kid that's going to be born and automatically get that $1,000—OK, there you go. But that doesn't mean you have to put any more money into it.

Now that all of that is out, let's go to Suze School.

All right, something has been upsetting me, so can we just talk? Can we just talk? And this all started because I was looking at some of the posts on the Women and Money community app, and there was one person in particular that was so proud of the fact that she or he sold stocks like Walmart and Costco and decided to put that money into the stocks like Palantir and whatever else it was.

I don't remember what they put it into, but stocks that had been going up and up and up. The other day I was telling Keith Fitz-Gerald about this, and here's what he said. No, they can't do that! Those are great stocks. Why would they get out of those stocks?

I don't want you feeling like, oh, you have to put all of your money only in the stocks that are AI oriented or that are chip companies or whatever they may be. No, you cannot have a portfolio of 100% movers and shakers like that.

You need a portfolio that also has really great quality stocks like a Costco, like a Walmart, and you would never sell those stocks to put them more into stocks that have been making you more money.

Now I get very well a lot of you have made a whole lot of money in certain stocks that we've been talking about for a long time, and the truth of the matter is I think you're going to make a whole lot more money, honest to God, in those stocks. And there are certain stocks that I don't know if you do own or not, but the stock like Apple that I've been telling you forever, I do think you should own that stock. Absolutely.

Meta may be one of the best stocks that you should be owning, but again, under a dollar cost averaging technique, OK, but those are stocks that I hope you're in or that at least you could add to the list of all the stocks that we have given you.

But I just want to tell you a story, all right, and the story goes back to 1999 and in 1999 we were really in the middle, so to speak, of the dot-com bubble.

The dot-com bubble started in 1995, everybody. A lot of the internet stocks, the dot-com stocks were listed on the NASDAQ, OK?

And the NASDAQ at that time in 1995 was at 1,000 and it was in April I believe in 1999 somewhere in there when I was, I believe it was the Larry King Show or one of the shows and I was on and now here we are still pretty deep four years into the dot-com bubble and

Larry, or I think it was Larry, but whoever it was, asked me and said, What would you buy right now, Suze Orman? Name it one thing that you would buy.

And back then, ETFs were still relatively new. Not many people knew about ETFs—exchange traded funds—and in fact there were only a few of them. But the one ETF that I did like back then was the QQQs, and those are still available today, and they're all about the IT stocks and things like that.

And I said if I were going to buy one thing today, I would buy the QQQs, and they were right around $52 a share, I believe, right in there.

About a year later, March of 2000, they were all the way up to I think $100 a share. But come 2001, all of a sudden they were down at $30 a share.

All right, just put a pin in that for a second, all right.

And I remember going back on and again, I think it was Larry King, and he said, you know, Suze, people are mad at you. You told them to buy the QQQs at 52, and now they're down at 30. What's up?

I said, Larry... They were all the way up to 100. They doubled their money. You never asked me should they sell or anything, so that's when I learned about being very careful when you tell people to buy something and also if you can't tell them maybe when to sell or when to be careful about it.

So, all right, I learned that lesson back then. TV was very different than it is now. Podcasts weren't around then, so it was more difficult because you never knew where you're going to be on a show again, were you not not, whatever.

So the nine years from March 2000 when they were at 100 all the way to January 2009 where they were at 29. It's nine years. That's a long time for something to go down and down and down. OK, just again, think about that for a second.

All right, and in case you're curious right now, the QQQs are at 577, but that is besides the point.

So the NASDAQ. From 1995 to about March of 2000. Went from 1,000. To 5,000. That was five times in just five years.

But in 2002 the NASDAQ had lost 80%, OK.

And the reason that I tell you this story is that I will never ever forget this woman. Who somehow I connected with and she was at some talk or something I was giving and I may have told you this already, and she came up to me and she said she was older, she was like in her 80s I think and she said, Suze, you'd be so proud. I have 90% of my portfolio invested in dotcom stocks.

And I went, No, you can't do that. She said Suze. I'm making a fortune. I'm making an absolute fortune. I said, All right, now that you're making a fortune, can you just sell and take those profits and think about diversifying into XYZ or just keeping it in a, you know, cash account or whatever?

And she said, no, I'm going to even put more money in it. I remember wanting to throw up seriously. Because I like, oh no, oh no, you could see it coming. Now why could I see it coming?

Another story that I've never told you is it was during that time that a venture capital company approached me. And they wanted me to be Suzeorman.com.

They had laid out all of this money and how I could be the next internet sensation and I could be Suzeorman.com. And I could be the CEO and I would have this CFO and they had picked out all these people that would work with me and they were ready to go. They had the money to bring it out.

And I'll never forget, I said, I just, I, I just have to think about this, OK, everybody.

And I remember walking. I was on 40th Street somewhere in there in Manhattan, and at the time I was living on 57th Street, so I had to walk up 17 blocks and then another, you know, 6 or 7 blocks to where I was on between 1st and 2nd and rather than getting in a taxi or whatever, I decided to just walk and I walked and I walked.

And I was like, I don't want to be a CEO. I don't want to have all these people and all these things going on, and I just want to be Suze Orman, and they want to bring me and be a Suzeorman.com on what? What backing it? How are we going to do that? That's just, I don't want to do that. I don't want people to lose money on me. My job is to make them money, and then I realized, oh my God.

If I'm being offered something like this, this is the end of the dot-com bubble. Seriously, that's when I knew we were in trouble. That was that.

Now... Obviously I'm not comparing what's going on right now in AI and the chip stocks and all of that to back then because back then most of those companies, they didn't have earnings. It was just this thing that was going on and you know, interest rates started to go up and there was nothing behind these companies really.

However, a few of them remain, such as Amazon and eBay, but most of them honest to God, just disappeared, gone off the charts.

So here we are today and the NASDAQ. Today, by the way, is 21,622. It's almost near its all-time high.

However, the stocks of the QQQ or the stocks of the SMH or the stocks that we have been talking about on this podcast now for this year and some of last year are stocks that have earnings potential, and they are the stocks of the future. This is not the dot-com bubble, everybody.

However, when you start treating it like that, where you are coming out of good quality stocks to go 100% or even into the AI stocks, that starts to scare me. That is not being smart on any level whatsoever.

So it's not about putting all of your money in stocks that are absolutely skyrocketing. And what I've said to you before, listen, if you really want to be involved in those futuristic stocks that are actually the present right now, that we have talked about—AMD, AVCO, Apple, Meta—stocks like that that we have talked about, Palantir, and I know all of you are like, no, Suze, don't talk about Palantir because of what they're doing, but I still have to talk about it for those of you who have been invested in it because this isn't the end of Palantir.

Palantir is still on its rise up, or IONQ—all those stocks, OK. I don't have a problem with you doing that on any level. NVIDIA, you know, somebody wrote and said, Well, what about this? NVIDIA is still going to go up. These are fabulous must-own stocks. They really are, everybody.

But you always have to remember, even though I do think that they're going to go up, they absolutely could also go down, so they're going to go up, they're going to go down. That is why you want a dollar cost average into them.

However, you have to have other things. So if you want and you just want those individual stocks or you don't want to own them individually and you want to do it through the SMH, although you'll make more money, I think, if you own them individually—because the truth of the matter is 50% of the ETF, the SMH, is made up of NVIDIA, AVCO, TSM, Taiwan Semiconductors, AMD, it's made up of that.

I remember just a little bit ago I did a podcast on you make more money in individual stocks than ETFs, which is why I was wanting you kind of to switch from SMH to that, but SMH is still fabulous, really it is. And so what you could do, right, is that again you can own those individual stocks or SMH, maybe put 30% or 40% of your portfolio in that, but the rest in the VOO—the Vanguard S&P 500 Index—or the Spiders or whatever it is that you have, but you have to have diversification like that.

You just have to be smart, and if you're lucky enough to own Walmart or Costco or any of those like that, great, great.

One other thing which is I've given you many, many names, many ETFs, many individual stocks. I can't remember if I gave you one ETF by the symbol XBI. It's a Standard and Poor's 500 biotech ETF. Really liking that one, by the way. Wouldn't hurt to dollar cost average into that, but just know that you need other things besides just those stocks that are really, really great, those mega caps, great. What can I tell you? They've just been great.

Few other things that I just want to say. I gave a podcast on stablecoins. Did you not hear me say in that podcast that stablecoins are not investments? Bitcoin, ether, those are investments, and I still love Bitcoin. Ether's going now as well, but I love Bitcoin.

You know I love Bitcoin. You know that I love it as an ETF—IBIT, I-B-I-T—or through possibly a stock by the name of Strategies, MSTR. You could do that. Also Coinbase—symbol COIN—interesting way to play it for a very small part of your portfolio.

But don't go getting confused between a Bitcoin and a stablecoin. A stablecoin is like cash. I would not be buying it right now. You don't need to put money in it right now. But if the day comes that all of a sudden you never know when the dollar could be replaced by that. You never know what can happen in the future. I was just giving you an education as to how stablecoins work.

Many of you took it as if I was saying stablecoin is an investment. It is not an investment. A money market fund is not an investment. A cash account is not an investment. It's where you keep money that you just want safe and sound. Got that, everybody.

Bitcoin or ether, those are investments, and I still think Bitcoin is going to go up to approximately 170. I don't know when, but I do think that it will go there.

All right, so I think that's everything that I wanted to talk to you about today. Few more things, which is don't forget to subscribe to my official YouTube channel. That's youtube.com/suzeorman. Go there because there's lots of things there and subscribe.

Also on the 19th, on Tuesday after 10:30 a.m. East Coast time, there is an article coming out in Kiplinger.com about mistakes I don't want you to make during retirement. You might want to take a read of that. You would go to kiplinger.com/retirement. Kiplinger is K-I-P-L-I-N-G-E-R. So kiplinger.com/retirement.

The other reason I'm telling you that you should want to go there is that they will be offering the new edition of the "Ultimate Retirement Guide for 50+" for $10 including shipping. So if you go there you'll be able to click on it and order the book there—$10 including shipping.

You know, the other day I was looking through that book and I have to tell you. It's a really, really fabulous book, if I must say so myself. So if you haven't bought it yet, New York Times bestseller, if it's there for you, you might want to take advantage of it.

All right, so until Thursday, there's only one thing that I really want you to remember when it comes to your money, and it is this. The goal of the Women and Money podcast, and everybody smart enough to listen, it is to help you make your money, make more money.

It is just that simple, but you have to listen closely. You have to do the things that I tell you to do. You have to not do the things that I tell you not to do, and you have to just stay safe, secure, and healthy. Got it? Just that simple. Love you and see you soon. Bye bye.