Suze Orman: Young People Could Retire Millionaires by Doing This One Thing
Suze Orman has one obsession when it comes to building wealth: start now, not "someday."
It's not exactly groundbreaking advice, but the math behind it is dramatic enough to make you actually listen. Wait just 10 years too long to start investing, she argued, and you could cost yourself hundreds of thousands of dollars.
She's made this case twice, in two separate breakdowns, with two different sets of numbers. Both times, the conclusion lands the same way: the clock is the one part of investing you can't buy back.
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The $700K Mistake Young Investors Keep Making
In a 2024 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Orman took aim at the one mistake she sees young people make over and over: they don't grasp what their youth is actually worth.
Here's the math. Say a 25-year-old drops $100 a month into an S&P 500 index fund through a Roth IRA until they turn 65.
"It's very probable that you will average a 12% annual rate of return over 40 years," said Orman. "At the end of those years, you have a million dollars."
Now push that start date back just 10 years. Same monthly contribution, same account, same market — except this time, at 65, you're sitting on $300,000. You wind up $700,000 poorer just because you waited.
"[Young people] don’t get that," added Orman. "They would rather dress cool, go on their TikToks."
The Same Lesson, Two Years Later
Two years later, she made the same case again, this time to a younger crowd. In a May 2026 blog post, Orman pivoted her advice toward teens and new grads heading into their first summer jobs with retirement on the backburner.
“Now, you and I both know that retirement savings may not be at the top of their to-do list. Can’t really blame them, right? But at the same time, saving when they are young is the absolutely perfect time! The younger they are, the more years they will have for their money to compound,” she wrote.
This time, instead of monthly contributions, she ran the numbers on a single $5,000 deposit into a Roth IRA, assuming a 7% annualized return:
Invest now: grows to $150,000 over 50 years
Wait 10 years: grows to just $75,000 over 40 years
Different scenario, same brutal lesson: one decade of procrastination cuts the outcome in half.
While emphasizing the necessity of getting started as early as possible in order to have well-funded retirement nest egg, Orman also admitted that a little help from mom, dad, grandparents or other relatives could get the ball rolling.
And while the contributions to a Roth IRA must not exceed the earned income of the individual holding the account, she pointed out that “the money for an IRA can be gifted by anyone."
The Bottom Line
Orman's math changes depending on the scenario, but the message never does: Time is the biggest lever you have, and every year you wait pulls it further out of reach.
If you're young, the takeaway is simple. Open the Roth IRA now, even with a small, unglamorous contribution. $100 a month sounds unremarkable at 25, but it'll look a lot more remarkable at 65.
This article was provided by MoneyLion.com for informational purposes only and should not be construed as financial, legal or tax advice.
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