Suze Orman: Cut This Expense That ‘Happens Over and Over Again’

Jordan Rosenfeld

Fri, May 9, 2025, 10:02 AM 4 min read

Suze Orman, a leading voice in personal finance and a bestselling author, recently joined GOBankingRates on the Richer Way Podcast, hosted by Jamie Catmull, to share her wisdom on ways people can get control of their money.

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Along with some tips on how to relate to money and how to be frugal, Orman pointed out one expense that adds up very quickly and cuts deeply into people’s savings and other financial goals. Find out below what that expense is, how to cut back, and what else you can do to build wealth.

Almost everyone who is spending too much or not saving enough is probably making this mistake, Orman said, and that’s an expense “that happens over and over and over again.”

So what is it? Dining out.

“For you to have money, you have to learn to live below your means, but within your needs,” Orman said.

A need is food you buy at the grocery store. A want is going out to eat and doing so repeatedly, she explained.

To illustrate this, she pointed out that years ago, as a guest on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” she asked the representative for the financial app Mint.com what was the No. 1 debt people carried on their credit cards — the answer was dining out.

In her 2010 book, “Suze Orman’s Action Plan,” she told people that if they want to save money, they should stop eating out for six months. Numerous readers wrote to tell her how much money they saved.

“I myself obviously am a very, very wealthy woman, and the very last thing I would think about doing is going out to eat,” she said.

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People have a variety of attitudes toward money that are learned from childhood, their partners, social media or society at large, and not all of these are healthy, to say the least. Orman insisted that to get your finances in order, you need to think of “the true role that money plays in your life.”

Her advice? “[M]oney is simply a manifestation of who you are,” said Orman. “You are the ones who have to go out and work for it. You are the ones that have to decide are you going to save it, spend it, invest it? Money cannot do anything without you.”

If something is going wrong with your money, she asserts that means that something is going wrong with you “because you and your money are one.” This puts impulse buys and monthly payments under a whole new microscope.