Wealth & Money Quote by Suze Orman

Suze Orman’s “People first, then money, then things” lands like a mantra, but it’s really a rebuke to the way consumer capitalism trains us to sort our lives. The line is built on a simple hierarchy, almost parental in its cadence, and that’s the point: personal finance is usually sold as spreadsheets and shame, while Orman pitches it as values work. She’s not just telling you to be “nice.” She’s insisting that your budget is a moral document.

The subtext is a pushback against a particularly American anxiety: the fear that you’re one bad month away from collapse, and therefore every decision should be optimized for accumulation. Orman flips that script. “People” signals relationships, care obligations, boundaries, even the uncomfortable truth that money fights are rarely about numbers. “Money” sits in the middle as a tool, not a trophy. “Things” gets demoted to the status it usually pretends not to have: optional, seductive, and endlessly marketed as selfhood.

Context matters. Orman rose in the era of mass-market financial self-help, when credit cards and home equity were pitched as lifestyle fuel and the punishment for getting it wrong was brutally personal. Her hierarchy reads like a corrective for a culture where status purchases masquerade as stability. It’s also quietly strategic: prioritizing people often means building networks of support; prioritizing money means creating resilience; deprioritizing things means refusing the churn that keeps you feeling behind.

It works because it sounds like common sense while smuggling in a radical reorder of priorities: you don’t exist to serve the economy. The economy is supposed to serve you.