Robert Kiyosaki, The Businessman
You might have read the book “Rich Dad Poor Dad”, or at least heard it is one of the must-reads in the personal finance space. Even I’ve written my notes on it in the form of an article, you can check that out here. But let’s focus on the guy that wrote that book, and how he is qualified to dole out finance advice to millions of people.
By the way, he’s now aggressively targeting Indian audiences apparently because he has come onto some very famous Indian podcasts like this one and more.
Anyways, what businesses does he have?
He started his business journey as a salesman of copy machines for 4-5 years, after which, he started another company that sold nylon and velcro wallets. This company was forced to file for bankruptcy later on.
He also started another company which produced items for heavy metal rock banks, like shirts, hats, etc. In the 1980s he shifted his focus to the education business.
He co-founded a company teaching the concepts of business and money. He also released his most famous book “Rich Dad Poor Dad” in later years, which has gotten him a huge amount of success. It was and is a very readable book, primarily in story form containing comparisons between the mindsets of the rich and the poor.
Kiyosaki has repeatedly said that he believes in “real” assets, meaning the assets that can’t be replicated. So he is a strong believer in gold, silver and bitcoin. And while he does not obviously recommend holding cash, he is also not in favour of holding stocks, because he can’t control what happens to his investments. He does however own gold and silver mines because that is “God’s money”, he says. He also says Bitcoin is the “people’s money”, but I don’t know if he owns Bitcoin mines too.
He also earns a good chunk of change through seminars, where my guess is that he would be talking about the mindset of creating wealth and real estate majorly. Obviously, there would be many more topics around money that only attendees can tell us.
He has talked extensively about buying real estate, particularly during times of distress to the economy, when there is cheap pricing of assets and low-interest rate loans available (like 2008-09). He said in a podcast recently that he owns thousands of homes, meaning a LOT of passive income. He has even said that with the shift of bases of Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC) to the state of Arizona in the USA, he shifted there to make use of the growth in land prices that would occur with the growth of the company. (TSMC makes chips used in many of our phones)
While he talks about businesses at length, there is criticism around the fact that much of his wealth has been created because of the sales of his numerous books, which would amount to tens of millions of dollars in profit for him, considering the fact that Rich Dad Poor Dad itself has been sold tens of millions of times around the world!
Robert Kiyosaki has a net worth of more than $100 million. And while you can argue about taking or not taking advice from someone whose companies have gone bankrupt and whose major wealth comes from writing about business instead of just conducting business, he is a very rich man. And the fact remains, the ideas he gives out in his books would have helped thousands if not millions of people to break out of a vicious cycle of living on paychecks. The one thing I would definitely want to take out of his playbook is identifying opportunities: gold, silver, bitcoin, real estate, all of it for cheap, at least he says, who knows.
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