‘You Are the Very First Person’: Suze Orman Breaks Her Never-Lease Rule for 66-Year-Old

On a recent episode of Suze Orman’s Women & Money, Orman broke a rule she has preached for decades. A 66-year-old single caller named Nancy asked whether she should lease or buy her next car, wanting to upgrade into newer self-driving technology as it improves. Orman’s answer broke her standard position: “I want you to know, Nancy, You are the very first person” she has ever told to lease instead of buy.

That matters for any reader over 60 weighing the same question. The wrong choice locks you into a depreciating asset you will want to dump in three years, or pushes you into a lease that quietly costs more than ownership over a decade. The stakes are real: tens of thousands of dollars over a typical car-ownership horizon.

Why Orman’s Exception Is Correct

Orman’s general rule still holds for most buyers. Her exception for Nancy is correct because of a financial concept most people never name: obsolescence risk. In a fast-moving technology cycle, it dominates the math.

Here is why buying usually wins. A new car loses roughly 20% of its value the moment you drive it off the lot and depreciates fastest in the first three years. If you lease during that window, you pay for the steepest part of the curve and walk away with nothing. If you buy and hold for 10 to 13 years, like Nancy did with her last car (“Last one I had for 13 years”), you spread depreciation across more than a decade and capture all the value of years four through 13, when the car is paid off and the cost per mile collapses.

Now flip the scenario. Nancy explicitly told Orman she expects to upgrade as autonomous tech evolves: “with technological advances, I will probably go into the next big advances as they come.” That single sentence rewrites the math.

Consider an illustrative example. Assume a $50,000 vehicle. If Nancy buys it and trades it in after three years for the next generation of self-driving features, she might recover $30,000 to $32,000 at trade-in, eating roughly $18,000 to $20,000 of depreciation plus tax, title, and registration. If she leases the same car for three years at $550 a month, her total outlay is closer to $20,000. She never tied up $50,000 in cash and walks away with no resale headache. When the planned holding period is short and the trade-out is certain, leasing transfers obsolescence risk to the leasing company. That is what you are paying for, and in Nancy’s case it is worth it.

Who Should Consider This Exception

The exception works for a narrow profile. Consider leasing if you check all of these:

1. You are over 60, can pay cash for the car, and are choosing the lease for flexibility, not affordability. Nancy told Orman, “I can afford to buy outright”. A lease taken because you cannot afford to buy is a different situation.
2. You genuinely intend to upgrade every two to four years because of a feature you actually use, like advanced driver assistance. Nancy had already tested the self-drive add-on and loved it.
3. You drive few enough miles to stay inside standard lease caps (typically 10,000 to 12,000 per year). Excess-mileage charges erase the math fast.
4. You do not want to deal with selling or trading a car every few years. For a single 66-year-old, that logistical cost is real.

Buy, do not lease, if you keep cars 8 to 13 years, drive heavy miles, or are leasing because the monthly payment looks smaller than a loan payment. That last trap is what Orman has spent her career warning against, and it has not changed.

Run the Numbers Before You Sign

Pull the lease’s money factor (multiply by 2,400 to get the equivalent interest rate), the residual value, and the capitalized cost. Compare the three-year total lease cost against the three-year depreciation of buying the same car outright. If you plan to keep the car more than five years, buying almost always wins. If you plan to trade out in three because the next tech generation is what you actually want, leasing can win. The cash you would have spent buying can sit in a high-yield savings account or short Treasury earning interest while you drive.

Orman’s never-lease rule is still the right default for almost everyone. The exception is narrow: an older buyer who can pay cash and who genuinely plans to upgrade as fast as the technology does. If that is you, the math flips. If it is not, buy the car.