Suze Orman

In October 2003, his mother, Dionne Murphy, brought him to New York from their home near Washington, D.C., as a present for his tenth birthday. While at Rockefeller Center, they ran into Orman.

"How much allowance do you get?" Orman asked him at the time."$10," he said.

"And if I told you that if you put it in the bank, the bank would pay you, what would you do?" she asked. "I would put it in," he said. He did, and so did his mother. She started investing in a 529 college fund for her son, based on Orman's advice. The Murphys didn't have any further contact with Orman until a few months ago, when Deontae, now 17, entered his senior year of high school and started applying to colleges.

His mother had managed to put away $570 a month so that his college fund now stood at more than $30,000. Deontae said he wrote an e-mail to "The Suze Orman Show" to let them know how much the advice helped. He will be the first one in his family to go to college.

To Orman, the Murphys' story illustrated what she said she has been preaching and writing about for years.

"Dionne is somebody who chose life over financial death," Orman said. "She is somebody who set her goal on the fact that she wanted her child to go to college, she did not want to get in credit card debt, she wanted to do it the right way and no one was going to stop her. She is living the American dream."

In her 10th and most recent book, "The Money Class," Orman writes about the death of the "old" American dream, which was materialistic.

"It used to be more, bigger, best," she said. "Everybody in America started to define themselves by all these things they had around them. And all of a sudden it came tumbling down. So the old American dream has died, and that is a good thing." A good thing, she said, because those values were false. Orman said a new American dream is now emerging, rooted in reality. Family and responsibility have replaced the want for the biggest house on the block.

"It's a dream where you actually get more pleasure out of saving than you do spending," Orman said. "It's a dream where you live below your means but within your needs. You are not spending every penny, you are not impressing people. You are living a life where you can sleep at night and you are actually happy."

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