Financial guru Orman, bestselling author of The Road to Wealth, offers a program aimed at helping listeners achieve financial freedom. The tapes combine Orman speaking in the studio with excerpts from her seminars. While Orman does offer practical advice along the lines of using dollar-cost averaging to buy mutual funds and reducing debt, much of her counsel focuses on the psychological hold of money. Orman believes that everyone's attitudes about money come from their childhood; she discusses her father's hard luck, including twice losing his business to arson. Feeling shame about affluence or watching a parent waste money on luxuries invariably impacts people's ability to save, spend or invest, says Orman. Having control over one's life often leads to an abundance of money. On the other hand, for example, when a person is out of work, everything seems to go bad—he or she can't get job interviews, friends stop calling, etc. Orman is open about her own life's successes and failures. She explains how she started working as a broker, without any financial background, simply because she desperately needed an income and a large brokerage firm needed to hire women to fulfill a quota. Orman also discusses losing her business when an assistant took all her office records, bank accounts and clients. There's no doubt Orman is engaging, and her up-front approach is less assaulting on audio than video. Her anecdotes are usually interesting and she easily explains complicated financial formulas so that any listener will understand them. (May)
