10 ms·

Rich dad, poor dad – the story that formed my views on making money

87 points by mwidell 11y ago

dsr_ 11y ago
The basic problem with Kiyosaki is that he wrote a work of fiction and passed it off as autobiography. No, wait, the basic problem is that he is passing inspirational advice off as financial advice. But don't take my word for it, read the critique: http://www.johntreed.com/blogs/john-t-reed-s-real-estate-investment-blog/61651011-john-t-reeds-analysis-of-robert-t-kiyosakis-book-rich-dad-poor-dad-part-1 http://www.johntreed.com/blogs/john-t-reed-s-real-estate-inv...
- tim333 11y ago
  Also he's outsourced some of his seminars to some pretty sketchy operators http://youngandthrifty.ca/rich-dad-poor-dad-seminars-a-scam/ http://youngandthrifty.ca/rich-dad-poor-dad-seminars-a-scam/
  - MCRed 11y ago
    General advice for anyone young who is reading this-- if the person you're trying to learn from offers seminars, it's a good sign he's not worth your time, and seminars are rarely worth the money. "Free" ones are the worst. Good books are the best educational value (though maybe some MooCs are a better value now.)
- bachmeier 11y ago
  This quote from that link sums it up best for me: "But you have to admire a guy who can spin two or three paragraphs of very ordinary financial platitudes into such a range of books." Luckily I bought my copy at a library book sale for something like 50 cents. I quit after reading half of it, because there's just nothing there.
tmorton 11y ago
RDPD is basically a fad diet book. There's some good advice, but it's mixed with bad advice and illegal schemes, slathered with a thick layer of inspirational bullshit. For a better personal finance book, try "I will teach you to be rich", despite the clickbait title: http://www.amazon.com/Will-Teach-You-To-Rich/dp/0761147489 http://www.amazon.com/Will-Teach-You-To-Rich/dp/0761147489
- lowmagnet 11y ago
  Also, my interactions with Ramit (through his blog) have always been a pleasant experience. The title and bright color was bait by his own admission. The point being he follows it up with great practical advice instead of stories and filler.
deleted 11y ago
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pkorzeniewski 11y ago
The problem with all these "how to get rich" books is that they're full of anecdotes, quotations, fictional stories, motivational bullshit etc. which make you feel good while reading them, but as soon as you put the book back on the shelf, it's all gone. It's just a temporary boost of energy and motivation, because reading requires almost no effort and more often that not it's just another way of procrastination. Seriously, do you think the majority of rich people prepared for "getting rich" by reading hundreds of motivational and self-help books? It's not like you'll find some magical recipe in one of the books which you can just apply to your life and 10 years from now become a billionare. Each success story is so different and depends on so many factors - being in right time at the right place among the most important - that it's impossible to simply recreate any of them and just wait for the results.
- ranko 11y ago
  Absolutely - all mixed in with a good proportion of survivorship bias: all we learn (at most) is that someone behaved in a certain way and became "successful" (for some values of success). We never seem to hear about those who did the same things and never made it rich.
- ZeroGravitas 11y ago
  Possibly this is biased, but I'm not sure I'd ever seen this kind of financial self-help book till I saw them in the US. I flicked through a few books expecting basic info about compound interest or whatever but instead it was all "if you believe hard enough then the money will be magnetically attracted to you" and similar woo. A very strange experience.
  - kaitai 11y ago
    The US: a mixture of economic fear, economic hope, and pseudo-Christian rhetoric that is stoked for gain by many. “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Ronald Wright "17 percent of Christians surveyed said they considered themselves part of such a movement, while a full 61 percent believed that God wants people to be prosperous. And 31 percent—a far higher percentage than there are Pentecostals in America—agreed that if you give your money to God, God will bless you with more money." Time magazine, Does God want you to be rich? Healthcare costs cause 62% of personal bankruptcies in the US; 72% of those who file for bankruptcy due to medical costs had health insurance at the time of illness. RomneyCare didn't change those figures in Massachusetts much even though everyone had health insurance, and ObamaCare has not made much of a dent there either. What will an average person do in the face of such market forces? One (God-given) illness will wipe away everything they ever had, and just getting a better job won't in general help -- it's not a big enough pay bump. And collective political action is for socialists. So... pray! edit in response to some downvotes: I'm not saying anything anti-religion or anti-Christian here; read carefully.
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mataug 11y ago
How did this get up-voted to the front page ?
branchless 11y ago
How I hate people like this. "Building assets and letting them work for you". For this you can read: "be the footsoldier for the banks who have a monopoly on money creation. Ask the bank to create money for you then use this to join the land monopolists. Then let those stupid little people who are actually creating wealth rent it back from you. This way you get a stream of their labour." For assets read "property". People should be aiming to keep most of the wealth they create. What makes the world shit, and what we cannot all do, is live off the backs of others. If he knows people who are billionaires they go there by not passing on the wealth created by others. Nobody adds a billion of wealth creation, not even Gates.
- tim333 11y ago
  >Nobody adds a billion of wealth creation How about JK Rowling. Must be close.
  - barrkel 11y ago
    Copyright is a temporary monopoly; monopolies tend to drive up prices.
    - tome 11y ago
      Yes, but not beyond the value to the eventual purchasers ...
      - barrkel 11y ago
        That isn't particularly relevant. Value to purchasers is not constant. With a higher price, you generally get fewer purchasers, and with a lower price, more. I could argue that the maximum net societal value for any already-written book is generated by having a price of zero. The question of price then becomes one of incentive: what price generates sufficient profit to motivate the creation of cultural products? A price that generates billions for the author is probably too high.
- miseg 11y ago
MCRed 11y ago
I read this book, was skeptical given the gungho attitude, so I did some due diligence: Roberty Kiyosaki claimed to have founded a company that went public. So I figured Kiyosaki was a rare enough name and searched the SEC records to find out if this was true. Was unable to find any evidence that he had taken a company public, and so he lost credibility with me. You meet really entertaining characters in bars sometimes too. They are fine for entertainment but don't take them too seriously. Putting money to work for you is wise, good advice and there are better books for it. Like "The millionaire next door" and "the wealthy barber" (a little lite but a good intro) and "Buffetology" and "The dummies guide to REITs" and the like. Managing real estate yourself is no small task- you have tenants and a lot of work to do for them. Putting an agency in between you and the tenants means you may be giving up a lot of your profits to the agency. The best thing that happened to me, though was I started reading http://mises.org http://mises.org. There in 2000ish I learned about how the fed and CRA were going to create a housing bubble. And the consequences of that. I invested along that thesis in the mid 2000s, getting out of the market in 2007 when things were too crazy to make sense (missed the top by a year, but still good timing.) Macroeconomic understanding (And I don't mean what politicians talk about or the politically connected people like Paul "we need a housing bubble" Krugman) has been very profitable for me. More profitable than any stock tip. Also gained a lot of insight from attending Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meetings, but now I just read the annual reports.
- branchless 11y ago
  Plus in "managing real estate" you are living off the backs of others in a flawed system. These real-estate "investors" are simply the foot-soldiers of banks who are creaming off real wealth creation. You only have to think about it for a moment to realise this. What if everyone did it? We'd all starve. What if everyone worked hard to gain a skill and then used it to create wealth? We'd have a great life. I understand what's happening with land exploitation but I won't join in because it's disgusting. It's not "just business" as these sorts would say.
  - mywittyname 11y ago
    > What if everyone did it? We'd all starve If everyone did anything other than grow/hunt food, then we'd all starve. The entire structure of our economy is built are specialization where only a small fraction of workers produce enough food for the entire population.
sharemywin 11y ago
entrepreneurship is a 1/0 game generally. Investing everything you have into something that has a 95% chance of failure is pretty risky. I would argue putting more than 10-20% of your money into one venture is really risky.
- mywittyname 11y ago
  I disagree. There are lots of tried and true businesses out there which have a high likelihood of success with some basic research. It's just that a lot of these markets are cornered, so you probably wouldn't call investing in them entrepreneurship. Opening a McDonalds or gas station has a pretty high likelihood of success with enough research. As does real estate. Trying to invent the next great technology is hard, and you'll probably fail. But following in the footsteps of others greatly increases you odds of success.
twistedanimator 11y ago
Hands down the best book I have read on money is Your Money or Your Life: http://amzn.com/0143115766 http://amzn.com/0143115766 I'm a naturally frugal person, but the book helped me formulate new ways of thinking about money and my relationship with it. The major concept being that money is a representation of your life energy. You work X hours a day at an hourly rate of $Y. Knowing those numbers allows you to think about purchases in a new way. For instance, "That new phone will cost me 2.5 days of work" or "If someone offered me $500 or the new phone, which would I take?" If you chose the $500, then you know you don't need to buy the phone. I would recommend Your Money or Your Life before all other financial "self-help" books. In fact, I think I'm going read it again.
- hammock 11y ago
  That advice seems to apply to wage slaves (hourly rate) but not entrepreneurs or salespersons (not hourly). Many other financial books recommend developing income streams outside of selling your labor at an hourly or yearly rate, which would seem to be missing from your book.
  - twistedanimator 11y ago
    Even the salaryman can calculate his hourly rate. I am salaried, but when I sat down and calculated my hourly rate, I was a little shocked. I didn't factor in benefits or anything besides my after tax take home pay. It's as simple as $(2 week paycheck) / 80. What you get is effectively your hourly rate. As a salaryman, knowing this value will help you avoid working overtime since overtime is unpaid. The more hours you work, the less your effective hourly rate. I would argue that if you are asked (either implicitly or explicitly) to work more than 40 hours a week, you should find a different job as you are diluting your own pay.
    - tome 11y ago
      I think you're misunderstanding hammock. Indeed only (forms of) the salaryman can calculate an hourly rate.
- 11y ago
liquidchicken 11y ago
I've come away from some of these types of books with some good tidbits, but have a hard time recommending them, especially to a young person. They tend to be a gateway drug into a culture of "The secret to making money is giving me some money." that I'm not comfortable with. I'd be far more comfortable recommending something data driven like "The Millionaire Next Door" (regardless of how that book is marketed) that highlights things like frugality, saving, and hard work.
glossyscr 11y ago
Many years ago a CEO friend told me about this book. I was an useless office drone daydreaming the startup dream. I read the book. I was super motivated for 3-4 days but nothing happened. Nothing. After one week motivation was gone and I had been an office drone for a decade. In hindsight: the book is great and the key message is very true. And this book is a great motivator (three days motivation is better than nothing) but in my case I needed way more to enter the dark side than reading a self-help book (which would be another long post). Life is more complex.
piyushco 11y ago
There are many things beyond what is written in article that makes rich people rich. However this is good book for all people in general.
anon4 11y ago
Isn't he basically preaching a rentier economy? That sort of thing is not sustainable at scale - at best you can have something like 10% of people getting rent (leeching off of) the people doing the actual work. Speaking ethically, this is one of the sleaziest ways you can make money - you're making your own basic income, except it's 5 times bigger than the income of the people who actually do the work. You're depriving honest workers of the fruits of their labour. People like him are what's wrong with society today and nothing short of a bloody revolution will set us back on the right path.
- branchless 11y ago
  Yep, he is. The guy is a leech. Another is mr money moustache with his 3 homes telling us to save by eating oats or whatever. These guys make me sick. I half agree that we need a revolution, these people can never be persuaded of their ills they are just horrible people.
  - mywittyname 11y ago
    What exactly is your argument here? Why is he a horrible person? Because he rents houses? There's nothing inherently exploitative about renting homes. Owning a home in the US is within the reach of most American families. So lots of people rent because they chose to. Some people prefer the flexibility to move, don't want to do maintenance, or prefer to live in higher density areas where personal homes are less common. People who rent real estate are just providing a service, and a critical one at that. If nobody rented places to live, then we'd have a lot of homeless people in the world.
    - branchless 11y ago
      Yes they are horrible and yes they are exploiting people. It's not a service, they are exploiting the capped supply of a basic need. The argument about "if nobody rents out" is just wrong. Are they going to knock the place down if they don't rent? Yes there is a need for rentals but this should be within a world where we have land value tax so the bulk of the gain is passed onto the state to reduce labour taxes, reduce land costs and improve living standards. These guys are adding nothing, they are taking labour. The cost of a home is not the cost of the bricks it's the cost of the land in the main areas with employment prospects. The USA was originally a land of opportunity. Why? Because you could get hold of land cheap. You were no longer constrained to near-serfdom by total land enclosure in Europe. Now here we are back to square one with the rentiers creaming off labour and books on how to join them.
tome 11y ago
Reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad represented a paradigm shift for me. Having been brought up in a middle class, academic family and moving successfully down an academic track, it opened my eyes to ideas that I couldn't even have comprehended existed before. I don't know if the majority of what Robert Kiyosaki sells is bluff and bluster, but I do know that the foundational message of the book (as told in the quotes on this blog post) were absolutely revalational to me.
jevgeni 11y ago
Fun fact: in my almost 10 years experience in banking I've never met anyone in the industry, who'd consider the book not a scam. And you know you're in trouble, if even bankers consider you a scam.
- AjithAntony 11y ago
  Whether the autobiographical bits are true or not, the highlights as presented by the article are a valuable message for people who didn't already understand as such.
  - jevgeni 11y ago
    A friend of my is a zealous adherent of "Rich Dad, Poor Dad". So much so, that the first thing he did after saving up enough money on his first real job, was to follow the book's advice: take out two mortgages and get two apartments. That was around early 2008. In my opinion that is a very shitty outcome: you're stuck with real estate in a stagnant market, bogged down by mortgage payments, and thus totally lacking any professional mobility. Your only choice is to wait out, rent out what you can, and hope to break even sometime in the next 20 years. In my opinion, personal financial stability (and even prosperity) can be boiled down to a few simple rules: 1. Earn more money than you lose. 2. Be very careful with debt. 3. Take risks, but be very aware of the downsides. 4. If you have to invest, invest in yourself first (education, connections, etc.) and in securities second.
sebthomas 11y ago
I recommend http://www.theschooloflife.com/shop/how-to-worry-less-about-money-john-armstrong/ http://www.theschooloflife.com/shop/how-to-worry-less-about-... Similar lessons, less smarmy (own the ladder? dude, stfu).
- meapix 11y ago
  8 pounds less money.
Oras 11y ago
Depends on the perspective you read the book, it could be life changing. While I disagree with his manners described in the book, I totally agree with the way he described different mind sets between a business owner and a public sector employee.
spdionis 11y ago
The problem with a lot of such material is that it's very U.S. centric. Being from Eastern Europe a lot of the advice in the book is not relevant. The only good take away was the assets vs liability distinction.
JazCE 11y ago
My g/f and her friends got suckered in by this... they were going to the seminars which then led to currency trading. I think there might be some good tips in there, but IMO, very few people get rich from seminars, bar the seminar leader and the company behind it. but at the end of the day i'm a cynic and quite likely a wage slave for the rest of my life.
GBond 11y ago
2 books for the HN types (not as self-helpy as the titles make them appear): - The Millionaire Fast Lane - How To Get Rich (Dennis, not Trump)
kendrafaith 11y ago
I am a married man at the moment with two kids and i was stuck in a financial situation by august 2012 and i needed to refinance and pay my bills for my son medication. I tried seeking loans from various loan firms both private and corporate but never with success,and most banks declined my credit. But as God would have it, i was introduced to a Man of God a private loan lender by a friend named Mr. James and i got a loan sum of $10,000USD and today am a business owner and my kids are doing well at the moment. So dear,if you must contact any firm with reference to securing a loan with low interest rate of 2% and better repayment plans and schedule,please contact Mr. Alfred Kessinger he doesn’t know that am doing this but am so happy now and i decided to let people know more about her,he offers all kinds of loans to both individuals and company and also i want God to bless him more. You can contact his company through this email Am.invest@hotmail.com
deleted 11y ago
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87 points by mwidell 11y ago

dsr_ 11y ago

The basic problem with Kiyosaki is that he wrote a work of fiction and passed it off as autobiography. No, wait, the basic problem is that he is passing inspirational advice off as financial advice. But don't take my word for it, read the critique: http://www.johntreed.com/blogs/john-t-reed-s-real-estate-investment-blog/61651011-john-t-reeds-analysis-of-robert-t-kiyosakis-book-rich-dad-poor-dad-part-1 http://www.johntreed.com/blogs/john-t-reed-s-real-estate-inv...

tim333 11y ago
Also he's outsourced some of his seminars to some pretty sketchy operators http://youngandthrifty.ca/rich-dad-poor-dad-seminars-a-scam/ http://youngandthrifty.ca/rich-dad-poor-dad-seminars-a-scam/
- MCRed 11y ago
  General advice for anyone young who is reading this-- if the person you're trying to learn from offers seminars, it's a good sign he's not worth your time, and seminars are rarely worth the money. "Free" ones are the worst. Good books are the best educational value (though maybe some MooCs are a better value now.)
bachmeier 11y ago
This quote from that link sums it up best for me: "But you have to admire a guy who can spin two or three paragraphs of very ordinary financial platitudes into such a range of books." Luckily I bought my copy at a library book sale for something like 50 cents. I quit after reading half of it, because there's just nothing there.

tmorton 11y ago

RDPD is basically a fad diet book. There's some good advice, but it's mixed with bad advice and illegal schemes, slathered with a thick layer of inspirational bullshit. For a better personal finance book, try "I will teach you to be rich", despite the clickbait title: http://www.amazon.com/Will-Teach-You-To-Rich/dp/0761147489 http://www.amazon.com/Will-Teach-You-To-Rich/dp/0761147489

lowmagnet 11y ago
Also, my interactions with Ramit (through his blog) have always been a pleasant experience. The title and bright color was bait by his own admission. The point being he follows it up with great practical advice instead of stories and filler.

deleted 11y ago

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pkorzeniewski 11y ago

The problem with all these "how to get rich" books is that they're full of anecdotes, quotations, fictional stories, motivational bullshit etc. which make you feel good while reading them, but as soon as you put the book back on the shelf, it's all gone. It's just a temporary boost of energy and motivation, because reading requires almost no effort and more often that not it's just another way of procrastination. Seriously, do you think the majority of rich people prepared for "getting rich" by reading hundreds of motivational and self-help books? It's not like you'll find some magical recipe in one of the books which you can just apply to your life and 10 years from now become a billionare. Each success story is so different and depends on so many factors - being in right time at the right place among the most important - that it's impossible to simply recreate any of them and just wait for the results.

ranko 11y ago
Absolutely - all mixed in with a good proportion of survivorship bias: all we learn (at most) is that someone behaved in a certain way and became "successful" (for some values of success). We never seem to hear about those who did the same things and never made it rich.
ZeroGravitas 11y ago
Possibly this is biased, but I'm not sure I'd ever seen this kind of financial self-help book till I saw them in the US. I flicked through a few books expecting basic info about compound interest or whatever but instead it was all "if you believe hard enough then the money will be magnetically attracted to you" and similar woo. A very strange experience.
- kaitai 11y ago
  The US: a mixture of economic fear, economic hope, and pseudo-Christian rhetoric that is stoked for gain by many. “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Ronald Wright "17 percent of Christians surveyed said they considered themselves part of such a movement, while a full 61 percent believed that God wants people to be prosperous. And 31 percent—a far higher percentage than there are Pentecostals in America—agreed that if you give your money to God, God will bless you with more money." Time magazine, Does God want you to be rich? Healthcare costs cause 62% of personal bankruptcies in the US; 72% of those who file for bankruptcy due to medical costs had health insurance at the time of illness. RomneyCare didn't change those figures in Massachusetts much even though everyone had health insurance, and ObamaCare has not made much of a dent there either. What will an average person do in the face of such market forces? One (God-given) illness will wipe away everything they ever had, and just getting a better job won't in general help -- it's not a big enough pay bump. And collective political action is for socialists. So... pray! edit in response to some downvotes: I'm not saying anything anti-religion or anti-Christian here; read carefully.

deleted 11y ago

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mataug 11y ago

How did this get up-voted to the front page ?

branchless 11y ago

How I hate people like this. "Building assets and letting them work for you". For this you can read: "be the footsoldier for the banks who have a monopoly on money creation. Ask the bank to create money for you then use this to join the land monopolists. Then let those stupid little people who are actually creating wealth rent it back from you. This way you get a stream of their labour." For assets read "property". People should be aiming to keep most of the wealth they create. What makes the world shit, and what we cannot all do, is live off the backs of others. If he knows people who are billionaires they go there by not passing on the wealth created by others. Nobody adds a billion of wealth creation, not even Gates.

tim333 11y ago
>Nobody adds a billion of wealth creation How about JK Rowling. Must be close.
- barrkel 11y ago
  Copyright is a temporary monopoly; monopolies tend to drive up prices.
  - tome 11y ago
    Yes, but not beyond the value to the eventual purchasers ...
    - barrkel 11y ago
      That isn't particularly relevant. Value to purchasers is not constant. With a higher price, you generally get fewer purchasers, and with a lower price, more. I could argue that the maximum net societal value for any already-written book is generated by having a price of zero. The question of price then becomes one of incentive: what price generates sufficient profit to motivate the creation of cultural products? A price that generates billions for the author is probably too high.
miseg 11y ago

MCRed 11y ago

I read this book, was skeptical given the gungho attitude, so I did some due diligence: Roberty Kiyosaki claimed to have founded a company that went public. So I figured Kiyosaki was a rare enough name and searched the SEC records to find out if this was true. Was unable to find any evidence that he had taken a company public, and so he lost credibility with me. You meet really entertaining characters in bars sometimes too. They are fine for entertainment but don't take them too seriously. Putting money to work for you is wise, good advice and there are better books for it. Like "The millionaire next door" and "the wealthy barber" (a little lite but a good intro) and "Buffetology" and "The dummies guide to REITs" and the like. Managing real estate yourself is no small task- you have tenants and a lot of work to do for them. Putting an agency in between you and the tenants means you may be giving up a lot of your profits to the agency. The best thing that happened to me, though was I started reading http://mises.org http://mises.org. There in 2000ish I learned about how the fed and CRA were going to create a housing bubble. And the consequences of that. I invested along that thesis in the mid 2000s, getting out of the market in 2007 when things were too crazy to make sense (missed the top by a year, but still good timing.) Macroeconomic understanding (And I don't mean what politicians talk about or the politically connected people like Paul "we need a housing bubble" Krugman) has been very profitable for me. More profitable than any stock tip. Also gained a lot of insight from attending Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meetings, but now I just read the annual reports.

branchless 11y ago
Plus in "managing real estate" you are living off the backs of others in a flawed system. These real-estate "investors" are simply the foot-soldiers of banks who are creaming off real wealth creation. You only have to think about it for a moment to realise this. What if everyone did it? We'd all starve. What if everyone worked hard to gain a skill and then used it to create wealth? We'd have a great life. I understand what's happening with land exploitation but I won't join in because it's disgusting. It's not "just business" as these sorts would say.
- mywittyname 11y ago
  > What if everyone did it? We'd all starve If everyone did anything other than grow/hunt food, then we'd all starve. The entire structure of our economy is built are specialization where only a small fraction of workers produce enough food for the entire population.

sharemywin 11y ago

entrepreneurship is a 1/0 game generally. Investing everything you have into something that has a 95% chance of failure is pretty risky. I would argue putting more than 10-20% of your money into one venture is really risky.

mywittyname 11y ago
I disagree. There are lots of tried and true businesses out there which have a high likelihood of success with some basic research. It's just that a lot of these markets are cornered, so you probably wouldn't call investing in them entrepreneurship. Opening a McDonalds or gas station has a pretty high likelihood of success with enough research. As does real estate. Trying to invent the next great technology is hard, and you'll probably fail. But following in the footsteps of others greatly increases you odds of success.

twistedanimator 11y ago

Hands down the best book I have read on money is Your Money or Your Life: http://amzn.com/0143115766 http://amzn.com/0143115766 I'm a naturally frugal person, but the book helped me formulate new ways of thinking about money and my relationship with it. The major concept being that money is a representation of your life energy. You work X hours a day at an hourly rate of $Y. Knowing those numbers allows you to think about purchases in a new way. For instance, "That new phone will cost me 2.5 days of work" or "If someone offered me $500 or the new phone, which would I take?" If you chose the $500, then you know you don't need to buy the phone. I would recommend Your Money or Your Life before all other financial "self-help" books. In fact, I think I'm going read it again.

hammock 11y ago
That advice seems to apply to wage slaves (hourly rate) but not entrepreneurs or salespersons (not hourly). Many other financial books recommend developing income streams outside of selling your labor at an hourly or yearly rate, which would seem to be missing from your book.
- twistedanimator 11y ago
  Even the salaryman can calculate his hourly rate. I am salaried, but when I sat down and calculated my hourly rate, I was a little shocked. I didn't factor in benefits or anything besides my after tax take home pay. It's as simple as $(2 week paycheck) / 80. What you get is effectively your hourly rate. As a salaryman, knowing this value will help you avoid working overtime since overtime is unpaid. The more hours you work, the less your effective hourly rate. I would argue that if you are asked (either implicitly or explicitly) to work more than 40 hours a week, you should find a different job as you are diluting your own pay.
  - tome 11y ago
    I think you're misunderstanding hammock. Indeed only (forms of) the salaryman can calculate an hourly rate.
11y ago

liquidchicken 11y ago

I've come away from some of these types of books with some good tidbits, but have a hard time recommending them, especially to a young person. They tend to be a gateway drug into a culture of "The secret to making money is giving me some money." that I'm not comfortable with. I'd be far more comfortable recommending something data driven like "The Millionaire Next Door" (regardless of how that book is marketed) that highlights things like frugality, saving, and hard work.

glossyscr 11y ago

Many years ago a CEO friend told me about this book. I was an useless office drone daydreaming the startup dream. I read the book. I was super motivated for 3-4 days but nothing happened. Nothing. After one week motivation was gone and I had been an office drone for a decade. In hindsight: the book is great and the key message is very true. And this book is a great motivator (three days motivation is better than nothing) but in my case I needed way more to enter the dark side than reading a self-help book (which would be another long post). Life is more complex.

piyushco 11y ago

There are many things beyond what is written in article that makes rich people rich. However this is good book for all people in general.

anon4 11y ago

Isn't he basically preaching a rentier economy? That sort of thing is not sustainable at scale - at best you can have something like 10% of people getting rent (leeching off of) the people doing the actual work. Speaking ethically, this is one of the sleaziest ways you can make money - you're making your own basic income, except it's 5 times bigger than the income of the people who actually do the work. You're depriving honest workers of the fruits of their labour. People like him are what's wrong with society today and nothing short of a bloody revolution will set us back on the right path.

branchless 11y ago
Yep, he is. The guy is a leech. Another is mr money moustache with his 3 homes telling us to save by eating oats or whatever. These guys make me sick. I half agree that we need a revolution, these people can never be persuaded of their ills they are just horrible people.
- mywittyname 11y ago
  What exactly is your argument here? Why is he a horrible person? Because he rents houses? There's nothing inherently exploitative about renting homes. Owning a home in the US is within the reach of most American families. So lots of people rent because they chose to. Some people prefer the flexibility to move, don't want to do maintenance, or prefer to live in higher density areas where personal homes are less common. People who rent real estate are just providing a service, and a critical one at that. If nobody rented places to live, then we'd have a lot of homeless people in the world.
  - branchless 11y ago
    Yes they are horrible and yes they are exploiting people. It's not a service, they are exploiting the capped supply of a basic need. The argument about "if nobody rents out" is just wrong. Are they going to knock the place down if they don't rent? Yes there is a need for rentals but this should be within a world where we have land value tax so the bulk of the gain is passed onto the state to reduce labour taxes, reduce land costs and improve living standards. These guys are adding nothing, they are taking labour. The cost of a home is not the cost of the bricks it's the cost of the land in the main areas with employment prospects. The USA was originally a land of opportunity. Why? Because you could get hold of land cheap. You were no longer constrained to near-serfdom by total land enclosure in Europe. Now here we are back to square one with the rentiers creaming off labour and books on how to join them.

tome 11y ago

Reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad represented a paradigm shift for me. Having been brought up in a middle class, academic family and moving successfully down an academic track, it opened my eyes to ideas that I couldn't even have comprehended existed before. I don't know if the majority of what Robert Kiyosaki sells is bluff and bluster, but I do know that the foundational message of the book (as told in the quotes on this blog post) were absolutely revalational to me.

jevgeni 11y ago

Fun fact: in my almost 10 years experience in banking I've never met anyone in the industry, who'd consider the book not a scam. And you know you're in trouble, if even bankers consider you a scam.

AjithAntony 11y ago
Whether the autobiographical bits are true or not, the highlights as presented by the article are a valuable message for people who didn't already understand as such.
- jevgeni 11y ago
  A friend of my is a zealous adherent of "Rich Dad, Poor Dad". So much so, that the first thing he did after saving up enough money on his first real job, was to follow the book's advice: take out two mortgages and get two apartments. That was around early 2008. In my opinion that is a very shitty outcome: you're stuck with real estate in a stagnant market, bogged down by mortgage payments, and thus totally lacking any professional mobility. Your only choice is to wait out, rent out what you can, and hope to break even sometime in the next 20 years. In my opinion, personal financial stability (and even prosperity) can be boiled down to a few simple rules: 1. Earn more money than you lose. 2. Be very careful with debt. 3. Take risks, but be very aware of the downsides. 4. If you have to invest, invest in yourself first (education, connections, etc.) and in securities second.

sebthomas 11y ago

I recommend http://www.theschooloflife.com/shop/how-to-worry-less-about-money-john-armstrong/ http://www.theschooloflife.com/shop/how-to-worry-less-about-... Similar lessons, less smarmy (own the ladder? dude, stfu).

meapix 11y ago
8 pounds less money.

Oras 11y ago

Depends on the perspective you read the book, it could be life changing. While I disagree with his manners described in the book, I totally agree with the way he described different mind sets between a business owner and a public sector employee.

spdionis 11y ago

The problem with a lot of such material is that it's very U.S. centric. Being from Eastern Europe a lot of the advice in the book is not relevant. The only good take away was the assets vs liability distinction.

JazCE 11y ago

My g/f and her friends got suckered in by this... they were going to the seminars which then led to currency trading. I think there might be some good tips in there, but IMO, very few people get rich from seminars, bar the seminar leader and the company behind it. but at the end of the day i'm a cynic and quite likely a wage slave for the rest of my life.

GBond 11y ago

2 books for the HN types (not as self-helpy as the titles make them appear): - The Millionaire Fast Lane - How To Get Rich (Dennis, not Trump)

kendrafaith 11y ago

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