Podcast Episode - Suze School: Using The Stock Market To Make Your Money, Make More Money

This Suze School continues the theme of making your money work harder for you, by focusing on the stock market and having a diverse portfolio.  Make sure you have your Suze Notebooks ready, because there are several stock symbols you may want to keep an eye on.

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Podcast Transcript:

Suze: July 6, 2025. Welcome everybody to the Women and Money podcast and everybody smart enough to listen. All right, did you all have a good July 4th? Are you all safe and sound? Let's hope so. Before we begin, however, I have to wish my executive producer of the Suze Orman Show forever...

As well as the executive producer for my YouTube channel, YouTube.com/Suze Orman, it's doing very, very well, but I want to wish her a happy, happy birthday, and who is her? Amy Feller Gallant. I am telling you, we've been together now for I don't even know how many years, a lot, and she really is one of the more extraordinary, not only producers, the people I have ever met. So Amy, happy, happy birthday.

Now today is going to be Suze School, and I'm going to continue on the theme that I've actually been on for like the past 2 or 3 weeks now, which is make your money, make more money and it started to remember with comparing treasuries versus dividend paying stocks and how if you choose the right dividend paying stocks, you have time on your side and you know what to look for and everything like that, why dividend paying stocks could outperform treasuries big time, however, that did not mean that all of you should sell all your treasuries and go into dividend paying stocks.

All it meant was that if you have some treasuries that maybe are maturing and you're not liking the interest rates that treasuries are paying right now, you might want to consider some of that money, especially if you can lock it up for at least 5 years, so everything has time to perform in case what the markets go down.

That you might want to consider dividend paying stocks, so stop being so radical, everybody. When I get these emails, they say, Suze, so are you saying I should sell all my treasuries and buy dividend paying stocks? People don't be stupid. Seriously, I would never want you to be an all or nothing investor. Isn't that one of the laws of money, you do different things with your money, but not just one thing. So just remember that. So when you hear me say something or introduce a new possibility to you, use your brain. Have common sense as to how that would apply to your individual situation.

And then we also in terms of making your money make more money, we talked a few days ago how about it's smarter if you have money just sitting in a bank account that you do not need for at least a year or longer rather than having it sit there and make maybe 0.5% to invest it in a way that it's making more money and the way that I introduced to you. It was with the certificate that Alliant Credit Union brought out just the other day, and they did it specifically for the listeners of the Women and Money podcast because interest rates were going down and we worked together on it and we said give them something that they can't really get anywhere else so they came out with a one year certificate paying 4.30 APY.

So if all you have is $1000 which is minimum, you can do it all the way up to $75,000. For $75,000 or more, the APY is 4.35%. So again, you just simply have to keep the money in there for all 12 months to get that APY. Just that simple. Go to myalliant.com.

And online there you can absolutely become a member and get it. And by the way, for those of you who already were members and invested in their certificates, you could do it for 17 months. So you might want to think about locking it up for 17 months, but that's only for those of you who were already members and had invested in Alliant Credit Union certificates. So that's myalliant.com, A L L I A N T.com.

Now, first of all, I also want to thank all of you because the response to the podcast a few days ago in terms of announcing this was overwhelming. So many of you took advantage of it. And many of you wrote and said, Suze, I'm so excited cause my bank was going to be renewing my certificate of deposit for 3.5%, so I'm going to Alliant Credit Union, just saying.

But today's podcast, it is still about how to make your money make more money. So get out your little Suze notebooks. Cause you are going to need to write down many things today cause I'm going to be giving you new recommendations in what I think. So are you ready?

Overall I have to tell you, I think this year can be, and I've been saying this to you, have I not, that these markets would be going up and going down, but overall they would be going up. OK, I believe that there is a really good possibility that the Standard and Poor's will absolutely keep going up overall.

And you know, I happened to look back 10 years for the month of just July. What did it do in the month of July? And you know, for the past 10 years, the market was up in July. So this could be the 11th straight year in a row if the market continues up this month. Now we did what we said it was going to do. It was going to break its all-time high, the Standard and Poor's, by July 4th, and it did that.

So it seems that there are other areas in the market that seem to be in the position to be in an upward trend, and those areas are industrials, financials, value, and again obvious tech and AI overall.

Number one, remember, when investing, you should always be investing on a dollar cost averaging basis. So what does that mean? You decide on a specific amount of money every month or every three months that you're going to put towards your investments, and when your investment goes down, your dollars buy more shares. When it goes up, your dollars buy less shares, but over time you have averaged your price.

That's Number one. Number two, even though I'm going to talk about individual stocks in a second. Given that I really think the Standard and Poor's 500 has a really good possibility of hitting 7400 this year. I would like you all to be invested in the ETF SPY, so you have diversification number one and you are totally participating in the Standard and Poor's 500. So besides that ETF...

I'm now going to be naming different ETFs and different individual stocks, but to have a truly rounded portfolio, you might want to think about putting like 50% of your money that you're going to invest in SPY. And then the other remaining in 4 or 5 or whatever it is different stocks that you like what I'm going to be talking about now or ETFs.

Now before I go into naming certain things that I think you should at least be interested in looking at, there's no way for me to know your individual situations—do you have debt? Do you have an emergency fund? How long can you leave money invested? How secure is your job? Do you need repairs on your home? What is going on in your own personal financial life? I don't know.

The very first thing you need to know is can you invest money that you will not be touching for at least 5 years, OK, cause you need time for stocks sometimes in ETFs to work themselves out. So you and you alone or with the help of a financial advisor need to really decide is investing appropriate for you or not? How much should you be investing? Where should you be investing and things like that.

Now, obviously over these past few years actually starting all the way back in 2024 when I was on CNBC, I named certain stocks that I absolutely thought you should buy, and I have to tell you, I believe in those stocks even more today than I did back then. And those stocks are, and I'll give you the symbols.

Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL)—I've said to you over and over again, I love Apple. I love Apple. Apple was down. Apple was down. It was the time to be buying it. It's still the time to be buying it if it makes sense for you. So Apple, I still love.

Amazon (AMZN)—I don't have to like Bezos for this one, but I do love Amazon.

NVIDIA (NVDA)—we all know we love NVIDIA, and NVIDIA is still the king of the crop when it comes to stocks like that.

Broadcom (AVGO), and JP Morgan (JPM). I kind of think those are like must-own stocks to have in your portfolio and put them away. Now some of them are expensive stocks.

However, remember, if you have an account with like Fidelity or Schwab or anywhere that allows you to buy slices of a stock, if all you have is $50 that you could put into each one of those—great. But let's just say you want to do individual stocks, but you don't have a lot of money, but you want to just get started and even if you do have a lot of money and you want to just get started to see how things go and how it feels to be an investor.

Just buy slices. Again, a slice of a stock means just put in an amount of money that you want to and you own that piece of that stock. Now those were all names that I've told you about for a long time. Now I'm going to give you some new names that I haven't mentioned before of individual stocks.

I really like stocks like Lululemon (LULU), believe it or not, or Nike (NIKE), or the stock ONON. You know how everybody's wearing the same shoes—Ons, O-N. Great stocks. I like Goldman Sachs (GS), and there is a stock called Ulta Beauty that I've been watching for a long time. Symbol is ULTA, it's at about $477 a share. Very easily could go to $600. So those are new names that I think are worth taking a look at.

Now let's go to ETFs, which may be more of your cup of tea as to how you like to invest. Obviously my all-time favorite is SMH, which is semiconductors. It is at 283. Do you remember how long ago now we've been suggesting it? Did you buy it or did you just listen? Anyway, it's got a long way to go yet. So if you don't want to do individual stocks in this particular area, fine, do SMH.

Now remember when I started this podcast, I told you there are certain areas that I think you should be invested in: industrials, financials, value, things like that. So:

• XLI – an ETF that's about industrials
• XLB – a material sector ETF
• XLY – consumer discretionary
• IWD – the Russell 1000 value
• BKX – a bank index ETF
• HYG – a high yield corporate bond ETF paying about 5.83%

This is kind of out of the box for me, but HYG I just think when things start to go lower this should be going higher.

Now one other ETF that I've been telling you that I thought you should start buying, and when it was about 52, IBIT, which is an ETF for Bitcoin.

And Bitcoin right now is at about $108,000 a bitcoin, believe it or not. Its resistance level is $111,000. If it breaks through that resistance level—and again a resistance level is, it's hard for something to break through this resistance. It's like that's where it's kind of just settled in. But if it breaks through that resistance level and keeps going, don't be surprised if you see it at $140,000 a bitcoin. Obviously there's always risk in bitcoin.

You should go slowly with it, but it's just something that you might want to continue to look at as a viable alternative now, because Bitcoin is becoming more and more acceptable, especially so are the stable value coins and everything that's going on there. It doesn't hurt to take a look at that. Also gold—GLD is the ETF for gold. Doesn't hurt you to have a little bit of that as well.

And for those of you who want an alternative to gold, you might want to look at symbol FCX. That's Freeport-McMoRan, which is all about copper. Now I just gave you a whole bunch of names. Does that mean that I want you to go out and buy all of them? No. What I would like you to do, however, is take a look at each one.

Look at what they invest in. Look at what they manufacture. Look at all of that. And do any of them resonate with you that you might like to own one or two or three of these? The other thing I would love for you to do is to create a spreadsheet, so to speak.

Just simply in your little Suze notebook, write down every one that I just told you about. Write down what the price is on Monday as if you were going to buy them. And just track it and let's see how they do over a considerable amount of time. Remember, markets go up, markets go down. You're not tracking them to see, oh, how did they do next week. We're tracking them to see how they do in a year from now or two years from now. And did we make money or did we not?

For those of you who aren't used to investing, but you just want to get the feel of it, that is a wonderful way for you to do it, because when you actually put your own money at risk, sometimes when it goes against you right away, you freak out, you sell, and there you go, and then it turns around and it goes right back up again. So that's just something for you to think about.

The other thing is, and this will be one of our next Suze Schools, is where do you hold these stocks? Which account that you have should you hold stocks in, and what kind of stocks should you hold in your retirement accounts versus your investment accounts?

Cause a lot of you, when I ask you what is your money and your Roth IRA invested in and you say in the Roth, I go, What in the Roth? And you go, Well, you put your $7000 or $8000 in there, and that's where it is. I said, you do know that you can invest in there, and they just kind of look at me if I'm with them personally or they go silent if they're on the phone with me or even on FaceTime. And so what kind of investments should you own in a retirement account versus an investment account.

So we need to have a Suze School on that as well, because that is how you make more money on your money. Obviously you all know, I'm sure by now that the bill passed. And now we need to know how does it affect us, and the truth of the matter is we won't know for a considerable amount of time truthfully.

However, we do know that for 2025 your tips are not going to be taxed up to a certain amount of money, and Social Security as well will not be taxed, but you have to understand how it's going to work because it does not work like the majority of you think that it works and also it is only good until 2028. So on another Suze School I will go into detail first really about the Social Security and who gets to claim it and who doesn't in terms of not paying taxes and eventually I'll deal with tips as well.

Now before we end this podcast, I just want to remind you that the offer with Alliant Credit Union for a 12 month certificate for 4.30 APY and for amounts of $75,000 or more, 4.35 APY might not last forever. They did not give me a time frame on this, so any day now they could say that's it, Suze, it's over. So if you're interested and you want to make your money, make more money, that is the way to do it, especially with money that's simply sitting in a bank account, making you what, maybe 0.5%.

And are you kidding me, especially if you don't need it for at least one year. Go to myalliant.com. You will see me right there. And just do it. It's easy and you can do it all online.

OK, until Thursday when Miss Travis joins us, there's really only one thing that I want you to remember when it comes to your money.

And I'm changing it up, people. It is now our theme for right now, because I think we really need it more than ever, by the way. It is: make your money, make more money, and that's exactly what we do on the Women and Money podcast.

So now you stay safe.

Bye bye.