The Big Money has a bone to pick with financial guru Suze Orman — and unfortunately for her, they really did their homework. Forgive me for pasting liberally but it’s pretty juicy:

How a bottle-blond former waitress and self-described “55-year-old virgin” with a taste for the good life became the financial messiah for millions of Americans might be a fun Lifetime original movie. Why the masses continue to invest their faith in Suze Orman in the wake of a financial meltdown she never saw coming is a more timely question. The answer is complicated …

Although study after study has shown that personal bankruptcies are caused primarily by catastrophic events like divorce, job loss, and, above all, medical bills and that most of us are struggling with a gap between our income growth and the soaring cost of necessities like housing, Suze tends toward psychological causes that invariably blame the victim. Who is struggling these days, according to Suze? “People who grew up without much money and later earn a comfortable living sometimes spend too much to make up for what they didn’t get as children. … People who feel entitled to the good life, or are unconsciously copying a mother or father who lived beyond her or his means. … If you feel the need to impress people with what you have rather than with who you are, you are at high risk for credit card abuse.” This from a woman who spends $500,000 a year chartering private jets and who sells “Cruise With Suze” packages on an Italian luxury liner. (She has also hawked for GM, claiming that leasing a luxury car—you know, the kind that people drive to impress others—is a terrific financial decision: “If you ask me, that’s smart money!”) …

And although one of Suze’s mantras is how much she loves stocks—”[S]tocks, in my opinion, are the best investment vehicle for the growth of your money over time”—less than 3 percent of Suze’s net worth happens to be invested in them. Instead, she’s tucked away the vast majority of those royalties ($32 million-plus, after taxes) into insured, government-backed bonds. As she trilled to the New York Times Magazine a couple of years ago, “I have a million dollars in the stock market, because if I lose a million dollars, I don’t personally care.”

Marketing luxury vacation packages to her cash-strapped disciples? Shilling for GM and pushing leases on American cars as “smart money”? Invest as I say, not as I do? We’ve been looking for a stock-market scapegoat — burn the witch!