Is "Rich Dad Poor Dad" a Fraud?

You can distill all the advice this book has to offer into one sentence: Rather than succumb to lifestyle creep, direct your cashflow from your 9-to-5 towards other endeavors that can make you money. That's it. That's the book. There is no step-by-step guide on how to do this, just a narrative, anecdotes and a few examples mostly around real estate.

And for contrast, here is another book from the early 2000s that, seems to have stood the test of time:<p>The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don&#x27;t Work and What to Do About It<p>1: the entrepreneurial myth: the myth that most people who start small businesses are entrepreneurs<p>2: the fatal assumption that an individual who understands the technical work of a business can successfully run a business that does that technical work<p>&gt; Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working <i>on your</i> business and working <i>in your</i> business.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0887307280" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Myth-Revisited-Small-Businesses-About...</a>

I haven&#x27;t read the book, but does it really say this?<p>&gt; He also tells of how he can back out of contracts by inserting a clause “subject to the approval of my partner”, where said partner was actually his cat. That is called “fraud”.<p>How can you take anyone seriously who does a thing like this?

The &quot;If Books Could Kill&quot; podcast discusses this book and others in the same genre. The two hosts are reasonably thorough in their research, and quite amusing as well.

&quot;Get Rich&quot; books have frequently worked throughout history.<p>For the author.

One thing not mentioned in the article: People may be wondering how this book became so popular, basically it&#x27;s because it became intimately tied to the MLM movement, Amway specifically but it did spread beyond that. People at the top of the pyramids would buy thousands of copies to send down their &quot;downline&quot; as part of a motivational tool. The primary goal of someone near the top of an MLM is to convince everyone down the line that you are ripping off that it&#x27;s their fault for not hustling hard enough, and this book was and is one of the popular ways of doing that.

John T. Reed, an actual real estate guru, has been targeting Kiyosaki for decades.[0] Reed graduated from West Point and Harvard Business School, and he was so early into the real estate investing wave that he debated Robert G. Allen (No Money Down) on 60 Minutes in the 1970s. No one can ever find any of Kiyosaki&#x27;s investment properties. And check out his opinions of dozens of other real estate gurus on his web site.[1] He does respect a few, but they are few and far between.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;johntreed.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;john-t-reed-s-real-estate-investment-blog&#x2F;61651011-john-t-reeds-analysis-of-robert-t-kiyosakis-book-rich-dad-poor-dad-part-1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;johntreed.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;john-t-reed-s-real-estate-invest...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;johntreed.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;john-t-reed-s-real-estate-investment-blog&#x2F;61653315-john-t-reed-s-views-of-various-real-estate-investment-gurus-part-1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;johntreed.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;john-t-reed-s-real-estate-invest...</a>

I&#x27;ve done alright for myself investing and owning a small business. I read this book years ago and I found it gimmicky. It&#x27;s chapters and chapters of clickbait-y cliffhangers and parables that just never pay off with anything concrete. I recognized a lot of the rhetorical maneuvers from MLMs and &quot;filler sermons&quot; I grew up around. And the most financially illiterate people I know swear by it as an infallible text.

Even a quick glance at Kyosaki’s twitter will show you he’s gone full loony nowadays.

He already has stated publicly that the “rich dad” is a characterization. And the book is about the 4th product in his attempt to teach finance courses. So I’m already suspect of the article.<p>Yes it’s a terribly written book, but that’s typically the case from non-professional writers who just have something to say.<p>My biggest takeaway is that “stay in school so you can get a good job” is not a great wealth creation strategy. You just compete with other highly qualified candidates for jobs that pay 20-30% more (See 20+ years at Boeing). Jobs like this also attract other risk averse people.

Kiyosaki is absolutely a charlatan, I thought we all learned that in 2010?

If you want a book that will actually change how you think about money and leverage, I recommend Peter Drucker &quot;The Effective Executive&quot;. The first chapter alone is gold.<p>Apparently when Bill Gates was asked what he read, he started with &quot;well of course, Drucker&quot; or something similar. It&#x27;s harder to read, but the advice is actually useful!

Most criticism in this thread can be summarized as:<p><pre><code> He is dumb and unsophisticated He doesn’t give technical advice </code></pre> The assumption is that success comes from being smart or credentialed (or fraudulent). This is a bad bias because it manifests as an inability to learn from sources outside your demographic. Furthermore, you develop a susceptibility towards marketing which presents itself as sophisticated (journalist podcasts, Ted talks, ML white papers, etc).<p>It didn’t take a genius to make money in real estate in 1980. You probably have dumb relatives who did it too. The character traits that helped most were optimism and tolerance for risk. Is this true today? I don’t know. Thinking about that question is more fruitful than assuming failure and seeking evidence to support that view.

Yes and also 4 hour work week

I got my hands on the translated book and original computer game. As very first book about wealth management for poor people it’s fine. I wouldn’t use it blindly as an investment manual. Obviously I learned that wealth generating assets are better than consumed money. I inherited some money, bought an apartment. Its value skyrocketed and I had a down payment for a house. I didn’t had this option if I consumed the money buying fancy car back then. So yeah, the book and the philosophy helped me a lot. I don’t own endless wealth as a rich dad did though.

It&#x27;s a very terrible book BUT it was also super important, influential book at the time it was published. It can be both!<p>As a child, I read this book in a bookstore. Nothing else like this was available to me in the suburbs with parents who didn&#x27;t have any business experience. The idea of doing anything other than just &quot;getting a job&quot; was totally foreign. The book opened my mind to the idea that you don&#x27;t have to work for someone else your whole life and that you want to build appreciating assets.<p>Literally everything else in the book is fluff or flat out wrong. It&#x27;s not a good book. But for a lot of people, it was also life changing because it broke through in a place and a time when little else was available.<p>In 2024, we don&#x27;t need this book. There is so much content available online that is so much better. Someone would get more out of reading a random page of the bogleheads wiki than this entire book. But I wouldn&#x27;t call the book a &quot;fraud&quot; and I wouldn&#x27;t deny the amount of influence it had decades ago when it first came out.

My friends in college bought <i>Cashflow: the board game</i> so I had a chance to play it.<p>The notion that children were a financial burden, while correct, didn&#x27;t sit well with me.<p>Anyway, I&#x27;ve always read the title as &quot;Rich Dad Poor Dad but most importantly Rich Robert Kiyosaki&quot; because truly that to me was always the real goal behind writing this book.<p>I&#x27;ve made the financially sound decision to not buy any of his work and let others read it to me.

I read the book on someone&#x27;s recommendation, but I won&#x27;t be doing the same to anyone else. The only person that book helped get rich is the author.<p>Recently, his videos have been going around where he encourages everyone to get into debt and calls everyday working people suckers. I can only imagine how many more people he&#x27;s managed to swindle.

If you&#x27;re looking for motivational insights and a change in mindset about money, it can be valuable I think.

Yes.<p>It&#x27;s basically a salesperson&#x2F;charlatan selling you their book in which they tell you some very obvious things potentially their far more expensive entrepreneurship course.<p>If you want the book summarized, here it is:<p>- take control of your finances and understand what taxes, stocks, futures, etc mean

You can&#x27;t imagine how frustrated I get when week after week, month after month, I see his book on the &quot;top sellers&quot; of all the major bookstores in my country.

I don’t remember any specific advice from the book. My takeaway was that rich and poor have different mindsets and motivations which account for the difference in outcomes.

Every how to get rich&#x2F;successful book is a waste of time to read in my opinion. Go read a book that teaches you something valuable (to assist you in making money).

never read the book nor am I interested to do so but I have to say this must be one of the most mentioned books ever next to the bible. it&#x27;s like reality set out to find reasons to confront me with it in random places consistently about once every two months for at least 10 years by now.<p>and as for it being a fraud or not ... isn&#x27;t the answer obvious already from its cover?

On another note the author of the book, Robert Kiyosaki, has also been a rampant promoter of Bitcoin. Just recently he predicted the price of one Bitcoin to be 10 million USD soon: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasdaq.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;robert-kiyosaki-predicts-10-million-bitcoin-heres-why" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nasdaq.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;robert-kiyosaki-predicts-10-...</a><p>I don&#x27;t think you should take someone who says that seriously for your financial planning.

Also,… avoid this like the plague and read “IF YOU CAN” instead by the great Bill Bernstein. Thank me later.

the advice is all shit but the meta-game isn’t - writing pop advice books actually <i>is</i> lucrative, especially back then. It’s just that you have to pretend you’re doing something else, which in his case was some nonsense about residential property.

Picture this: Teenage me, eyeing a self-help book my old man brought home. I was skeptical, sure, but still green enough to think, &quot;Hey, it&#x27;s a bestseller. Gotta be some good stuff in there, right?&quot; Fast forward 20 years, and boy, have things changed.<p>These days, my BS detector goes haywire the second someone starts singing praises of self-help books. Finance gurus, spiritual know-it-alls (I&#x27;m looking at you, Eckhart Tolle), you name it. But the crown jewel of nonsense? &quot;The Silva Mind Control Method.&quot; I&#x27;m still gobsmacked by how many folks bring it up as their life-changing bible, despite it being chock-full of pure insanity.<p>The good news? It seems like it&#x27;s getting tougher for these wordsmiths to pull a fast one on people. Gone are the days when you could slap together a bunch of truisms, sprinkle in some tall tales, and watch the cash roll in.<p>But hey, it&#x27;s not all doom and gloom. There are some self-help gems out there that actually deliver the goods. &quot;Atomic Habits,&quot; &quot;Thinking, Fast and Slow,&quot; and Malcolm Gladwell&#x27;s &quot;Outliers&quot; spring to mind. These bad boys? They&#x27;re the real deal.

What is a good alternative book along the same lines?

I haven&#x27;t read his book but I&#x27;ve watched my parents try to follow his ideas and I&#x27;m worried they&#x27;re going to bankrupt themselves. They&#x27;re not dumb, my dad has a much more successful career as an SWE than I&#x27;ve had (at least so far) but he&#x27;s never been great with investing his money.<p>There are so many bad ideas out there. You really have to be discerning. I don&#x27;t really know what else to say but I&#x27;m glad I never expected an inheritance.<p>EDIT: I&#x27;m out of comments for today but they encourage leverage (specifically with mortgages) without really talking about how VAR works. I&#x27;m not sure if it came from the author or somewhere else but they have this really bizarre idea about how real estate markets work. The models he comes up with flat out don&#x27;t sound like viable economies to me.

&gt;As best anybody can tell, there never was this “rich dad” character as described by Kiyosaki.<p>This is just false. Rich Dad was guy called Richard Wassman Kimi.<p>There&#x27;s an interview with his son here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;CRq6sjpo9iU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;CRq6sjpo9iU</a>

This was one of the most frustrating books I ever read when I was young. A bunch of people around me kept talking about how they quit their jobs and found success after reading the book, how it had changed their lives. I&#x27;d ready it and come out with nothing. I couldn&#x27;t figure out what I was missing and just thought I must be dumb. It wasn&#x27;t until I learnt the trick: becoming successful by selling advice about how to become successful that I stopped worrying about it. This silliness is obvious now, but I was barely 20 back then.

Yes. Saved you a clock.

Yeah, I call it &quot;Real Dad, Fake Dad&quot;. Kiyosaki is also very much a part of the MLM motivational complex. Not to be trusted.

I think it is pretty well known that &quot;Rich Dad Poor Dad&quot; is a self help &#x2F;motivational speaker type book, that is to say it is mostly drivel. Is it fraud? As much as any of those books, seminars, products are.

It’s so insulting low effort BS that it’s almost sneering. I really don’t understand the phenomenon. I’ve had people earnestly recommend it to me as an “amazing book”. Is it the catchy name? (This is my strongest theory).

TLDR: yes<p>&quot;If Books Could Kill&quot; also did a critique for those who prefer to listen to a podcast.<p>I found the book appealing as naive young person. Yet so little of its advice was within reach to me. And the house I bought was a modest net loss compared to rent I would&#x27;ve paid. It boils down to buy cheap real estate and antiques that will be desirable in the future. I.e. be born in the right place, right time, to not too poor people, and make lucky choices. Also financial fraud wherever you can get away with it.