GuruWatch

Suze Orman, a regular person of interest here on GuruWatch is at it again? At what you might ask? Even while her brash personality and personal financial advice is debatable, there are not many who will argue that she is a savvy business woman who knows how to market herself. You can even see that she clearly thought through the colors to be used on her latest book cover. In short, she definitely knows how to make money …. for herself at least!

Suze Orman has partnered with TD Ameritrade to offer brokerage account bonuses to women who read and follow Orman’s advice from her latest self-help book “Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny“. In the book, Orman outlines a simple five-step, the “Save Yourself Plan”, intended to help women find long-term financial security. TD Ameritrade is helping tp promote Orman’s book by offering a $100 bonus to clients who follow the Save Yourself Plan, open a new brokerage account during the month of March and make monthly direct deposits of $50 or more for one year.

Forgive my eternal cynicism. But the “save yourself plan”? I’m still undecided as to whether that name is meant to motivate women by instilling fear or to uplift their spirit.

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Cap from StopBuyingCrap.com is assembling a list of gurus he hates and a few he doesn’t hate. Check out what he has to say about Trump and Kiyosaki.

The real reason why Kiyosaki is on this list though, is because of his irresponsible recommendations and suggestions on achieving financial independence. Many other personal finance bloggers have frequently mention his ill-considered financial advice as a Yahoo Finance columnist, which mostly consist of the same advices mentioned above.

Read Cap’s full analysis of Donald Trump, Robert Kiyosaki, Dave Ramsey, and others.

GolbGuru from Money, Matter, and More Musings ran the numbers and pointed out a major flaw with Dave Ramsey’s Drive Free, Retire Rich philosophy.

Dave Ramsey says:

You want a brand new sports car that would normally cost you $475 a month. The car you are driving now is worth $1,500.

If you take that $475 and pay yourself instead of paying the dealer, you’ll have $4750 in just ten months. Add that to the $1,500 you can get for your current car, and you can pay cash for a used $6250 car. That’s a major upgrade in car in just 10 months-without owing the bank a dime!

But let’s keep going. If you kept saving at that rate, you’d have another $4750 in another ten months. Chances are, less than a year later, you could sell your $6250 car for about what you paid for it. This means that you can step up again-with-cash-into an excellent $11,000 used car just twenty months from today! Not Bad!

GolbGuru rebuts:

Yeah..not bad…but not feasible either! Especially, this part: “Chances are, less than a year later, you could sell your $6250 car for about what you paid for it.”

Check out GolbGuru’s numbers here.