“A lot of people have gone further than they thought they could because someone else thought they could.”                     Zig Ziglar

1980 – Buttercup Bakery – Berkeley, California: After six years of waitressing at the Buttercup Bakery, 29-year-old Suze Orman knew she could do more than wait tables. Over a cup of coffee, she shared her dream about owning her own restaurant with Fred Hasbrook, a regular customer. When Fred paid for his meal that morning, he left Suze a check for $2,000 with a note saying, “Suze, this is for you so that your dream can come true.”

In the weeks following, Fred raised $52,000 from other restaurant patrons and friends toward Suze’s dream restaurant. He asked just one thing of her: that she put the money in a money market account at Merrill Lynch until she saved enough money to open the restaurant. Suze asked Fred, “What is Merrill Lynch, and what is a money market account?” After a brief education, she invested the money with Merrill Lynch’s Oakland, California, office.

 Growing up on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s, Suze Lynn Orman never thought she would amount to anything. Her Jewish Russian immigrant father worked in a chicken factory, her mother for a rabbi. As a little girl, she had a severe speech impediment, and later in elementary school, her reading scores placed her at the bottom of the class. Despite her mediocre high school grades, Suze was accepted to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her parents could not afford college, so she worked 7 days a week in a dormitory cafeteria to support herself.

She dropped out of college in 1973, one language course short of her social work degree. She borrowed $1,500 from her brother, bought an old Ford van, and set out with $300 and two college roommates to tour America. They ended up in Berkeley, California, where Orman got a job waitressing at the Buttercup Bakery, making $400 a month. While working there in 1976, she took a Spanish class at Hayward State University to complete her college degree.

When Suze took her $52,000 to a Merrill Lynch broker to invest, she told him that she only made $400 a month and needed the money to start a restaurant. He ignored her and made a high-risk investment. Within three months, he lost all her money. There would be no restaurant in Suze’s future. Devastated and embarrassed that the money was gone, she reasoned that she could be a stockbroker too – if all they did was lose money, she could certainly do that.

Suze got an interview at the same Merrill Lynch office that lost her money. Needing a woman on the staff, they hired her. When the boss told her she probably would not last six months, Suze was determined to prove him wrong. She read Barron’s Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and any financial information she could find. To her boss’s surprise, she passed the financial exam for a licensed stockbroker.

Suze’s personality and common-sense approach to investing made her popular with her clients. She remained at Merrill Lynch until 1983, when she joined Prudential Bache Securities as Vice-President of Retail Customer Investments. In 1987, she left Prudential and founded the Suze Orman Financial Group in Emeryville, California. She managed the firm until 1997.

The former waitress at the Buttercup Bakery is a financial advisor, motivational speaker, television, and podcast host. She is the author of ten New York Times bestsellers on personal finance, including Nine Steps to Financial Freedom and You’ve Earned It, Don’t Lose It. In 2002, the Suze Orman Show debuted on CNBC and aired until 2015. She has won two Emmy awards and eight Gracie Awards. A frequent TV financial commentator, she has appeared twice on the Times 100 list of influential people.

Suze Orman repaid the $50,000 that Fred Hasbrook and others donated toward her restaurant. Although Fred passed away in 1985, she will always be grateful to the man who believed in her enough to give his hard-earned money for her dream. In 2015, she retired and lives on a small private island in the Bahamas, where she spends her days fishing and boating. Suze’s advice to others: “If you are going down the street and you are going the wrong way, remember, God permits U-turns.”