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December 7, 2025 20 mins

This Suze School episode is packed with three very important lessons, starting with why one of the biggest mistakes you can make is basing financial decisions on friendship.  Then, Suze explains the correct way to do tax-loss harvesting and what steps you need to take, regularly, to avoid financial scams and fraud.


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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Suze (00:08):
December 7th, 2025. Welcome everybody to the Women in Money podcast,
as well as everybody smart enough to listen. And today
is Suze School.
So get out your Suze notebooks.
And we're going to start Suze School with a story.
And the lesson of the story is this friendship isn't

(00:33):
a financial plan.
Friendship isn't a financial plan, OK? That's the lesson of
this story.
Are you ready?
So...
I'm telling you this story truthfully because I really think
every one of you needs to hear this, especially, you know, women,

(00:56):
we tend to do things we don't want to do.
We say yes when we want to say no. We
think one thing, yet we say another, and I include
myself in this, by the way. I've learned that lesson,
trust me. My new lesson is don't say yes, Suze Orman,
when you want to say no.
So, if we're not careful, then this situation could possibly

(01:17):
happen to you, and it can cost you a whole
lot of money. There's this woman, and let's just call
her Susan, OK.
And she had about $2 million invested with a financial
adviser who had been doing absolutely remarkable for her.

(01:38):
And we're talking consistent 15, 20, even 28% returns over
the past few years, which is spectacular.
And he charged her a 1.5% advisory fee. Now, I know,
I know, I told all of you I wouldn't be
paying more than 1% in an investment advisory fee, but

(02:00):
sometimes when an advisor is in incredible demand.
And they are producing results like the ones I just
told you about year after year after year that if
they want to charge 1.5% and after that 1.5% fee
they're still talking 15, 20, 28, 30% returns, I don't

(02:22):
have a problem with that.
So here we are.
And one day, Susan is out to lunch with her really,
really good friend. And what do good friends do? They
always talk about their kids.
And the good friend happens to say, Susan, my son
just became a financial advisor.

(02:46):
And is it possible that you could do me a favor?
Do you think you would transfer your account to him
so he can look like he has clients that have money?
Think about what this good friend just asked Susan.

(03:07):
To change her account to her son who just became
a financial advisor.
Just so he can look good.
Now, besides the fact that I've told all of you.
In general, I wouldn't pay more than 1% for an
investment advisory fee unless the advisor is seriously worth it

(03:27):
and the numbers tell the story.
I've also said to you, I wouldn't dare invest with somebody,
especially in these kinds of markets who hadn't been an
advisor for at least five years, 10 years, 15 or
20 years, many, many years.

(03:49):
I wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole.
However, OK, but because Susan didn't want to upset her friend.
Because even though she may have wanted to say no,
she said, OK, yes, yes, I'll do it, and I
find that most women say yes out of guilt.

(04:12):
You know, I say this all the time.
Women would rather say yes out of fear that somebody
won't like them any more versus no out of love
for herself.
So what did she do? She actually called her financial
advisor up.

(04:33):
And told him, I'm moving my account.
And when the adviser said, why in the world are
you moving your account?
And she said, well, number obe, and the most important
reason is because he's only charging me 1% instead of 1.5%.

(04:56):
OK, now I just want you to think about this.
And this is the Suze School lesson of the day
and the one mistake I want you always to avoid.
You never base financial decisions on friendship. You never judge
an adviser solely by their fee.

(05:18):
It's not the fee that matters. It's the results. It's
the track record. It is the performance. Would you rather
pay someone 1.5% who has proven that they can make
you real sizable returns year in and year out?
Or 1% to someone who's absolutely brand new.

(05:41):
Untested.
And simply hoping to save that half a percent and
to help them out.
You have to know the answer to that. You just
have to know.
And the lesson here is what friendship is not a
financial plan. Guilt is not a strategy. Do you get this, everybody?

(06:04):
And loyalty does not grow your money. It does not.
So I want you to write this one lesson down.
You must protect your own financial security, even if that
means saying no to someone you care about.

(06:25):
All right, so now that we know that friendship isn't
a financial plan, the next thing I want you to
learn is about tax-loss, harvesting the correct way. And the
reason that I say the correct way is because a
few weeks ago I talked about this, and I told
you some of the things that I was doing in
my own account, and then you go to do it

(06:47):
and you write me and I go, no, no, don't
do that.
So, let's try this again.
Tax-loss harvesting is when you have gains in your investment
account outside of a retirement account and possibly losses as well.

(07:08):
And you want to offset your gains with your losses
so you don't owe as much in income tax as
you would if all you had was gains. So let's
talk about this. You need to first know the difference
between realized gains versus unrealized gains.

(07:29):
So what is a realized gain? A realized gain. Think
of the words that I'm using. A realized gain is
obviously you realized your gain. You actually got it, which
means you sold something. You took a profit, and you
took a profit because you sold it for more than

(07:50):
you paid, and
that's a realized gain. The IRS sees it, and then
the IRS taxes you on it. Just that simple. What
is an unrealized gain? And this again is just a
fancy word for you haven't realized them. You have a profit,

(08:11):
but you haven't sold it yet, so the gain lives
only on paper. You haven't realized it, so there's nothing
taxable yet.
So how does tax-loss harvesting work? All right, just listen.
Let's say you have a stock you don't want anymore,
and it's sitting at a loss. You can sell that stock,

(08:35):
realize the loss, and use that loss to offset any
realized gains that you already have.
That's one way that you can do it now. Sometimes
you actually have more of a loss than you do gains.
So if you don't use up all of your loss,
you can carry it forward to future years.

(08:58):
If you don't have any gain at all, you can
take $3,000 off and keep doing that every year.
So why am I telling you all this? Because a
lot of you heard me say you sell your losses
against your gains so you don't owe income taxes. But

(09:21):
here's the problem, you never ever sell a stock at
a loss if you want to own that stock, and
you best write that down.
You never sell a stock just to take a tax
loss if you believe in that stock.

(09:42):
Because listen to me, when a stock you love goes down,
that is not the time to run from it. That
is the time to do what, everybody? Dollar cost average
into it. That is the time to buy more. So
let's say you love Apple.
And it drops. It's down. You don't sell it to

(10:02):
take a tax loss. You buy more shares at a
lower price and bring down your average cost. So can
we just get that one thing straight? If you still
want the stock, you keep it. You only sell a
losing stock if you wanna get rid of it and
you don't wanna own it anymore. Got that?

(10:26):
So you really need to understand that. Because some of
you are doing this because you're writing me.
You have some losses in stocks that you actually like,
stocks like Oracle.
Stocks like PayPal, great stocks.

(10:46):
And you wanna sell those stocks to take a loss,
to offset some realized gains that you have in your portfolio,
obviously outside of a retirement account.
And I'm like, please don't do that. And people are
asking me, well, why shouldn't I do that? And the

(11:08):
reason you shouldn't do that is when you take a
loss in a stock, you cannot buy that stock back
for at least 30 days. Now, 30 days may seem
like a really short period of time.
But not in these markets. I have seen stocks go

(11:28):
down 40 points and all of a sudden in two
weeks they're up 60 points. So you think you're gonna
outsmart these markets and all of a sudden you sold
for a little loss and now 30 days hasn't passed
and now you sold it at let's just say $50
a share.
You bought it at 60.

(11:49):
And now it's at 80, but you weren't able to
still be in it because you sold it at a
loss simply to take a loss? No.
Again, you only sell a loss when you no longer
want to own that stock, and you can use that
loss to help yourself for tax purposes. Anything else? I

(12:12):
don't think so.
So you're confused about that. If you have, however, a
stock that you no longer want, which was true in
my case, there were two stocks that I had a
loss on, and I no longer wanted to own those stocks.
I made a mistake. Fine, I'm going to take the loss.

(12:36):
But at the time when I did that, I didn't
have any realized gains to offset that loss.
I didn't realize any gains yet. I had a lot
of unrealized gains, lots of unrealized gains, but no realized gains,
cause I still like all the stocks that I own,

(12:57):
except for those two. OK.
So what did I do? And this was just an example.
I sold the number of shares of stock that I
had a big gain in that was equivalent to the
loss that I was taking, so they offset each other directly.

(13:19):
So what did I do then? I immediately bought the
stock that I had to gain in back, the exact
same numbers of shares. Now, what did I gain by
doing that?
Let's just say I bought that stock at seven.
And now that stock is 160 or 70.

(13:41):
Which is true in this one particular stock, Palantir.
So even if I just sold 10 shares of Palantir
to offset my loss, let's say that was true.
And I bought those 10 shares back immediately. Now my
cost basis on those 10 shares

(14:01):
is $170 a share. If Palantir continues up, and I
now sell it at, let's just say $300 a share.
I'm only going to have a gain of 130 points
versus $7 to $300. Do you understand what I did?

(14:24):
So don't think it's just so simple where you sell
stocks to offset gains.
You only sell stocks that have a loss in it
to offset gains if you don't wanna own those stocks
ever again.
Am I clear on that now?

(14:45):
So, I have one more Suze school for you today.
And this lesson is about we live in a day
and age where scamming is rampant.
And you cannot be somebody who just sticks your head
in the sand, and you don't check your statements, you
don't check your accounts, you don't check your credit reports,

(15:06):
you don't look at your credit score. You cannot do
that in a day and age like this. You have
to freeze your credit reports. You have to do things
that protect you.
And by the way, I'm just going to say, and
to that end, come March next year, I will have
something that will seriously protect you and would have protected

(15:28):
you in this particular situation, but you're going to have
to wait for March to see that, OK.
And here's how it goes from Cheryl.
I've been a fan of yours and always have been
grateful for your advice and wisdom. In 2022, I purchased
two I bonds.

(15:48):
With all the financial fraud, I check all my investments
at the beginning of every month.
On July 4th I was unable to access my Treasury
Direct account.
As I never received an OTP and an OTP is,
once you go to sign in, they send you a

(16:08):
one-time password, and that's the password that you use.
Again, Treasury Direct is a governmental institution.
And most people who wanna buy Series I bonds, inflation bonds,
you have to buy them through Treasury Direct and have
a Treasury Direct account, OK? So you would imagine, wouldn't you,

(16:34):
that they were safe and sound. Please listen to this story.
To make a long story short, someone changed the bank
linked to my account and requested a distribution which was
completed on July 8th. No one from Treasury Direct verified

(16:54):
that it was me, and my account of just $11,000
was emptied.
Even worse, my account was still locked. I called repeatedly
with no adequate response and did not find out about
this fraud until TD sent an email to my secondary

(17:17):
email in October. This was July. Now it's October. Because
I don't always check that email. Oh, I will do
it daily now.
I only found out about it at that time.
I called at 8 o'clock in the morning asking to
speak with a fraud specialist.

(17:39):
And I was told that the only communication available to
me was to respond to the email when I continued
to argue with the person that I was talking to.
Her name was Rose, by the way, she hung up
on me.
I did respond to the email, but I Googled, Treasury

(18:00):
Direct complaints and found many similar stories. Every person posting
about these problems had their money sent to a checking
account at Pathword National Association.
And it goes on and on. Now I obviously wrote
Cheryl back a variety of things that she should do

(18:22):
and she should try, but the first thing I wanna
say to all of you, if any of you are
connected with Pathword National Association or if you have any
account that does business with them.
I am warning you right here and right now, I
would change that account. If you look them up, if

(18:46):
you Google them and everything, you can see all the
complaints that they have against them.
But the reason that I'm telling you this story is
that you would think that the money that you have
in your Treasury Direct account is the safest of them all.
Obviously it may be, but it may not be.

(19:10):
So it wouldn't kill you to check it all the time,
meaning at least once a month, twice a month, and
pay attention to your secondary email addresses just in case
Treasury Direct happens to contact you.
All right. Do I think that's enough for Suze School today?

(19:33):
I think I do. So what did we learn? We
learned that friendship is not a financial plan. We learned
that you only sell stocks at a loss to offset
gains when you no longer want to own those stocks,
and we learned that we have to be on top

(19:53):
of all of our accounts.
Everywhere we have an account and continuously check our credit reports,
our credit scores, our statements, and make sure that everything
is as it should be. So until Thursday when Miss
Travis joins us again.

(20:13):
For another Ask KT and Suze and me thing, there's
only one thing that I want you to know when
it comes to your money, and it's this
then money, then things. Now you stay safe.
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