Suze Orman has spent decades teaching Americans how to save, invest and build wealth. Her own net worth runs into the tens of millions. Yet she still refuses to eat at restaurants unless social obligation demands it.
'We still to this day eat at home,' Orman said in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal. At the time, she said her wife had prepared congee for lunch and meatloaf for dinner.
When the couple does go out, Orman said it is rarely because they 'want to'—it is usually to meet friends, and even then she insists on covering the bill. 'If we go out to eat, the deal is we have to pay because I am not going to let people, who I know don't have the kind of money that we have, waste their money on food eating out,' she said.
The numbers come first, and they favor her position. According to the U.S. Consumer Price Index, prices for 'food away from home' have been climbing faster than groceries, up 4.1% year-over-year compared with a 2.4% rise for food purchased to eat at home, while overall consumer prices rose 2.7% over the same period.
'Look up McDonald's. Look up Taco Bell. Are you kidding me? $23, $30 just to go to McDonald's for whatever you eat there,' Orman said.
Her frugality extends past sit-down meals. Orman, 75, has also said she skips coffee shops entirely. 'I do Cafe Bustelo coffee every morning,' she said in 2024. 'I would drop dead before I bought a coffee. I do one cup a day and that's it.'
In a separate 2019 interview with CNBC, Orman argued that redirecting a $100 monthly coffee habit into a Roth IRA could compound into hundreds of thousands of dollars over decades. 'You need to think about it as: you are peeing $1 million down the drain as you are drinking that coffee,' she told CNBC then. 'Do you really want to do that? No.'
She is not alone in the calculation. Shark Tank investor Kevin O'Leary has made a similar case for cutting daily discretionary spending. 'A coffee for five dollars and fifty cents. You go to work, you spend fifteen bucks on a sandwich,' O'Leary said in 2024, adding that many young earners on a $60,000 salary 'piss away about $15,000 a year on stupid stuff.'
Critics counter that treating every latte or restaurant meal as a betrayal of one's financial plan misses the point of budgeting, which is alignment with goals, not blanket denial. Orman herself has splurged on private air travel and owned property in Manhattan, the Bahamas and South Africa; O'Leary has spent on designer watches and jewelry.
The underlying lesson still holds for a market-minded reader. Capital rewards clear rules, and the clearest rule in personal finance is that a dollar deployed into compounding assets outperforms a dollar spent on convenience—especially as menu prices climb faster than grocery bills.
That gap between restaurant inflation and at-home food costs is not an accident of nature. It reflects labor costs, regulation and the broader price pressures Washington has allowed to build. Orman's frugality is a personal choice; the inflation eating into every American's grocery and restaurant budget is a policy outcome, and the taxpayer bears both.
