Many in the financial planning community loathe Suze Orman. Sheís laughing all the way to the bank.

Scott Dauenhauer, an independent financial advisor in Laguna Hills, Calif., groaned. Across the table sat a wealthy middle-aged woman, a prospective client, bearing a copy of Suze Orman's The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom. "She grilled me on Orman's stuff, basically deciding whether to hire me based on how much I agreed with Suze," he says.

It wasn't too hard for Dauenhauer, who works strictly on an hourly basis, to convince the woman that he was not the kind of money-sucking financial advisor slammed by Orman in her books and on her radio and TV shows. He even pointed out his differences with the wildly successful best-selling author-and still got the job.

But he couldn't help feeling a little raked over the coals. "Actually, I do agree with a lot of what she says and I occasionally recommend her to clients, especially if they're having emotional issues around debt."

But other advisors aren't so sanguine. "She puts down other advisors, especially those who work on commission, as a way of inflating her own image and ego-and selling more books," says Kevin A. Lacassin, a financial advisor with New Orleans-based Planning Associates of Louisiana.

For her part, Orman, who recently spoke with Financial Advisor about how she is portrayed by planners, can't understand what all the fuss is about. In her opinion, the criticism is all a great big misunderstanding motivated by jealousy and defensiveness. Speaking directly to advisors, she says: "If you could only see that I am your ally, not your enemy, my dear fellow planners. I want you to be as successful as you ever dreamed possible-as long as you do it ethically. And I have always said that a good financial planner is worth his weight in gold."

Somehow that positive message has been lost on advisors-and more important, on consumers. On her TV show for CNBC, where she is now the personal finance editor, Orman routinely disparages other financial advisors as "crooks" and "sheep." On one show, she urged a female caller to "put that advisor on the back burner-and turn up the flame."

It's not surprising, then, that advisors have taken offense. And they're not alone. The Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards has sent her threatening letters for allegedly violating its code of ethics by dissing other professionals, a charge she and her lawyers have fought. "So far I've been vindicated, but I'll probably lose my license one of these days," she sighs.

No matter. Orman knows what side her bread is buttered on. "The public loves me and they trust me," she says. "It's hard to argue with success."

She may have a point. Browse any bookstore in America, and you'll find her picture beaming wide-eyed from the covers of three New York Times best-selling books. Surf over to her Web site and buy her long-term care insurance. Flip on the tube and you're as likely to find her plugging PBS as touting her own books and tapes on QVC. She holds the shopping network's all-time sales record for having once unloaded 30,000 books in one hour.

And if you haven't gotten enough of Suze yet, you will. She's on her way to a town near you. This spring she'll be touring the military bases and strip malls of America in her very own rock-n-roll tour bus emblazoned with the name of her latest book, Laws of Money, Lessons of Life, due to hit bookstores in March. "An author of my stature doesn't have to do book tours to sell books," Orman points out with an unabashed sense of self-importance. "This is my way to keep in touch with the people who made me what I am."

Reality check: Orman likes answering financial questions from little old ladies in Utah. And they like her, too.

Much of the public may listen to this self-professed, self-promotional financial planning guru, but some financial advisors despise her with a passion that borders on frenzy. In public, they accuse of her everything from dispensing bad advice and misleading consumers to discrediting the financial planning profession. In private, their voices become strangely shrill and personal, calling her everything from "hustler" to "man-hater."

Granted, it's easy to make fun of someone who recommends rummaging through your closets to find loose change. And it's not surprising that advisors should take umbrage at her put-downs. What is surprising is the vehemence of their attacks.

Some advisors resent the certainty with which she responds to folks who call her radio and TV shows. "She gives a lot of advice without asking questions or else she asks irrelevant questions, and sometimes she gives reckless advice," Lacassin complains. "How can she know what's best for someone by talking to them for three minutes?"

As Orman herself points out, all her responses are delivered off the cuff, with no advance preparation, the same way that she now responds to this interview, with brazen confidence. "This is not brain science, folks. Obviously it's a whole different story when you're talking about multi-millionaires, complicated estate planning, or business succession issues. But money is just not as complicated for the average American. The majority of people who call my show are not asking how to invest $500,000. How long does it take to figure out if someone has debt, is planning a divorce, or is being sold a life insurance policy they don't need?"

Like all self-help authors, Orman's message is pious, practical and simplistic: Respect your money and it will respect you. She urges people to dig deep into their past to uncover their hidden fear, shame and guilt about money. Frequently, Orman's tips can seem disingenuous; will you really achieve financial freedom if you pump your own gas, switch from olive oil to plain old vegetable oil, and stop buying those French baguettes that go stale in a day?

Orman's messages also often resonate with women, even if her questions to people she barely knows seem awfully intrusive. But many times her bluntness gets right to the point. A 50-year-old doctor's wife who doesn't know anything about her husband's investments may get asked, "What are you going to do when he leaves you for a 25-year-old nurse?"

And her prescriptions have touched a chord among debt-ridden Americans. Spiritual packaging aside, the cure she recommends is straightforward, as she herself acknowledges. "My message is simple: If you have debt, that needs to be your No. 1 priority."

Orman's confidence-her positive and at times patronizing tone-may be what galls advisors most, even as it endears her to her fans. Her toughness is hard-won and not something for which she feels compelled to apologize. She has paid her dues, but her path to success has not been typical of the Wall Street boy's club. She grew up relatively poor on the South Side of Chicago, where her father ran a string of unsuccessful chicken stands.

She worked her way through a social work major at the University of Illinois by clocking two waitress jobs and sharing a $120-a-month apartment with three other women and, oh yes, John Belushi. In fact, she shared a bedroom with Belushi and his fiancée. "The scenes you saw in Animal House were pretty much how it was at our apartment," Orman says with a laugh. "I was wild, but I was always an incredible worker."

In 1974, Orman's brother lent her the money to buy an Econoline van, which she drove out to Berkeley with a friend. "The whole first month we slept on the streets in that van," she says. Orman finished her degree in social work by correspondence. She worked as a waitress for seven years, and then presented herself at Merrill Lynch, where she was hired as a broker "to fill the women's quota," she says.

Orman says her background as an outsider helps explain her appeal to middle America. "It's sad because money touches absolutely everyone yet it's presented in a formal way, in a foreign language that's only relatable if you're wearing a three-piece suit or heavy-duty makeup with your hair perfectly done. I talk about money on TV the same way I talked about it when I didn't have any."

Orman's background may also help explain her antipathy toward the world of finance. She learned her lessons the hard way, back when she was making 100 cold calls a day as a waitress-turned-broker at Merrill Lynch. "I learned how brokerage firms operated in a really harsh way. My manager at the time told me I'd be gone in six months, and that women belonged barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. I saw how brokerage firms would unload stocks in their inventory onto their clients. And I saw how they were not looking out for the best interests of their clients."

Still, Orman insists that she's not against all advisors. "I'm for you and I want you to make a living. But let's promote the ones that really care, and get those who take advantage of clients out of the business." What she can't tolerate, she says, are advisors who put their own interests above those of consumers, advisors who sell universal life policies as investments to people who don't need them, advisors who take RIA fees on fixed-income accounts, and advisors who sell loaded mutual funds when no-load funds would be more appropriate. It just so happens that in Orman's view of the world, that rogue's gallery seems to make up the majority of the financial planning community.

The most frequent complaint about Orman is that she's a hypocrite, bashing advisors while gaily promoting her own commission-based products such as her Protection Portfolio (a do-it-yourself will and trust kit) and her branded GE long-term care insurance. "As an independent advisor, I don't endorse specific products," Dauenhauer says. "It makes me uncomfortable that she's selling products on her Web site, especially when she comes down so hard on commissions."

Orman scoffs at the criticism. "I have never complained about legitimate financial advisors making a living off consumers," she says. "If you're a fabulous financial advisor, you should make as much money as you think you're worth-as long as your clients understand what they're paying for." Orman insists that she's clear about how she herself is compensated-and that she has nothing against commissions per se.

As if to prove her point, Orman divulges that she herself uses a "commission-oriented" investment advisor and offers his phone number on the spot. She travels too much and has too much money to manage her own accounts, she says, though her advisor never makes a move without consulting her. She's eager to provide a rundown of her current investment strategy-she keeps most of her substantial fortune in municipal bonds with a "play account" of about $500,000 in the stock market. "But I don't care about that money," she says.

At first Orman's advisor is taken aback by the phone call. But John Claghorn, a vice president and wealth manager with the New York-based private client group of RBC Dain Rauscher, quickly warms to his subject. He admits that Orman is an easy target. "We all laugh when Suze says to save your change and take it to a bank," says Claghorn, who manages about $200 million in assets with the majority of accounts between $2 million and $5 million.

Claghorn admits to disagreeing with Orman on some issues, for example regarding the uses of insurance. But he's adamant about her integrity. "Suze spent several years researching LTC policies before she settled on GE Capital. She talked to Lincoln National and John Hancock. She had every schlocky carrier in America wanting to hook up with her, and she could have made a whole lot more money than she has. She didn't just jump in. She did her homework for a couple of years, and even had me at the library doing research. LTC insurance is something this age group needs badly, and she ended up with a good product tailored to the middle class." He may well be right, but it just so happens GE Capital's parent, General Electric, also owns CNBC, the cable network that has made Suze a household name.

This is not the first time that Orman has given Claghorn's number to someone she just met. "Suze seems to attract people from all walks of life, and she treats them all the same," Claghorn says. "She had one woman call to say she had a $10,000 IRA invested in treasuries and wanted to invest in stocks, so I told her to put it in a CD or something instead. Then I get another call from a woman who sounds like the same type of person, but come to find out she has $8.5 million to invest."

Claghorn laughs, and says that working with Suze is fun. "We bounce ideas off each other, we have friendly running disagreements. Suze is exactly like you see her on TV: bubbly, direct, full of energy. She treats everybody with a huge open heart, and she does genuinely care. She might talk to someone for two minutes, but for those two minutes she feels those people, and she offers genuine help. She may not always be right, but she's for real."

What surprises both Claghorn and Orman most about the financial in-crowd's cool reception of her is that most of them would probably turn away the folks who call her show. "People are not coming to Suze to find out what stocks they should buy or who's the best high-tech manager or bond guy," Claghorn says. "They're coming to get assurance that what they need will be there in the future, and to find out how they can protect themselves and get some control." Or as Orman bluntly puts it, "I'm not stealing anybody's clients."

Even critics like Lacassin agree that much of the venom against Orman is based on envy. "She's one hell of an amazing saleswoman," he says. Or as Dauenhauer puts it, "Who doesn't want to have their own radio show and make lots of money?"

Orman lets most of the criticism slide right off her back. The only charge she can't abide is that she's nothing but a media creation, a result of some kind of Machiavellian master plan. "You can excuse my success to whatever you want, but you have no idea of the work that went into it, like when I first went on QVC and answered 80 callers a day for free for two straight years, or when my Web site first went live and I was up until 4 a.m. every morning, answering 25,000 e-mails. I made $5,000 on my first book, and maybe four people showed up for the book signing."

These days, she has two full-time employees, and works 16-hour days seven days a week. After her American tour, sheíll head off to Indonesia and South Africa. ìI never worked a quarter this hard when I ran my own practice. You should be careful what you wish for.
Orman is not the only one to make the connection between net worth and self-worth.

Unlike the Puritans, however, she assures you that God wants you to be richóor at least to feel rich. Hers is the New Age spin: You can feel better about yourself no matter how much money you have. In fact, the anecdotes in her books are not primarily about people who manage to strike it rich. Rather, she celebrates middle-class people whoóthrough the death of a spouse, divorce or plain old foolishnessófall on hard times and then, through their own efforts, manage to scrape their way back into the middle class. Reading her books can be depressing for the cycles of loss they tend to depict. However, they are a frank indictment of a financial planning industry that has utterly failed to educate the average citizen. Like other self-promotional, self-help gurus, sheís been accused of treachery and dishonesty. But the charges havenít managed to stick. ìYou know the TV screen magnifies a lie as well as the truth,î she says. ìIf it were all a bunch of bullshit, donít you think it would have come crashing down by now?î At the end of the day, what matters to Orman is how she feels when she looks in the mirror. ìIf my life were to end two seconds from now, I would have no regrets.