As the rest of us get poorer, Suze Orman gets a whole lot richer

Suze Orman, who's in white-hot demand these days, walks a fine line when it comes to paid commercial endorsements. On the one hand, doing ads can create a perceived conflict of interest for someone who claims to offer independent financial advice. On the other hand, turning down ad opportunities is clearly a dumb financial move (at least in the short term), and she's supposed to be smarter than that.
  Her solution: She does what she thinks she can away with. That means no bank ads, but stuff like "Got milk?" is fine. Here's her page on the WhyMilk.com Web site. In the video, she says this about her sellout-ishness: "Here's what everybody needs to understand about me. I've been asked to do many ads. I've been asked to do many endorsements. And I very, very seldom say yes, because I would never lend my face and my beliefs to just anything. I would do it because I believed in it and I thought it was a great value. So today, as I sit here, I don't actually think about all the other celebrities that have done ['Got milk?'], and what it feels like to be one of them. I think about how important what I'm doing really is."

—Posted by Tim Nudd