In honor of the Academy Awards, I thought it would be fun, to host celebrity week here at Gen Y Wealth. During this week, I will be giving you my opinion on financial celebrities Dave Ramsey, Suze Orman, and Robert Kiyosaki. Monday, I gave my thoughts on Dave Ramsey. Wednesday, I shared my opinions on Suze Orman. Today, we find out what I think about Robert Kiyosaki.
Introduction
Robert Kiyosaki is the well-known author of the Rich Dad, Poor Dad series. With now 15 books in print, that have produced sales over $26 million, according to his Wikipedia page.
Beyond being a best-selling author, Kiyosaki sells just about every other product imaginable. Including a board game, DVD’s, and audiotapes.
Are his products, worth the investment? Lets fund out…
Good
Motivating
There’s no doubt you will feel motivated to get rich after finishing this book.
Assets
If the book had one main point, it would be to acquire assets. An asset is anything that produces income.
If you can work on acquiring assets that produce enough monthly income for you to live off of, you can became “rich.”
Personally, this was the first time that I ever thought of this concept. However, I later found that other books explain this concept a lot better.
Big on Financial Education
Kiyosaki is big on self-education. More specifically, financial education. This was actually one of the main reasons I read this book, to broaden my financial education. It’s a lot different then what I normally read.
Bad
It’s Fiction
We don’t know which parts are true and which parts are false. We do know that these words lay in the copyright page of his recent books, ““Although based on a true story, certain events in this book have been fictionalized for educational content and impact.”
I find that sentence to be a huge problem.
Makes It Sound Easy
Although very motivating, the book makes it sound as if getting rich was easy. For anyone reading this book without a background in finance, one would think that getting rich is simple.
How Many Books Does It Take?
If you type Robert Kiyosaki’s name into Amazon, you have to scroll through 5 pages until you get a book by another author. Should it really take that many books to explain to you how to get rich?
Ugly
Unfortunately I wasn’t very shocked after watching, “Who’s Getting Rich Off Rich Dad?” If you don’t have time to watch the 20-minute video, here’s what I got out of it.
Kiyosaki’s company is holding weekend seminars, called “Learned To Be Rich” across North America. The price of the seminar is $500 per person.
The goal seems to be to get you to attend, sell to you the dream of becoming rich, and then attempt to aggressively up sell you to another Kiyosaki product. Some of these products cost as much as $45,000.
In order to get you to pay for these sessions, the seminar’s speaker, (it’s not Kiyosaki) will try to get you to raise your credit limit on your credit card. At one point attendees were told on the spot to call their credit card companies and ask for a $100,000 credit limit.
It’s frightening to me that this is actually going on. I feel very sorry for anyone who buys into this dream.
This was just one of my concerns after doing some research on Kiyosaki’s background. If you want to learn more about the ugly side, John T. Reed has a very detailed analysis of Robert Kiyosaki on his website.
Conclusion
If you want to learn how to get rich from a fiction book, read The Richest Man in Babylon. The most important lessons from Rich Dad, Poor Dad are better explained in George S. Clason’s classic book.
{ 1 comment }
I’ve read and reviewed Rich Dad, Poor Dad too to see what the hype was all about. I agree that his material is motivating, but light on useful information. And like you, the biggest thing I got from the book is to spend your time buying assets, and not liabilities.
It might be a good book to re-read when I need motivation or a reminder, but it’ll then lead me to read more technical books.
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