"Rich Dad, Poor Dad is one of the dumbest financial advice books I have ever read. It contains many factual errors and numerous extremely unlikely accounts of events that supposedly occurred.
Kiyosaki is a salesman and a motivational speaker. He has no financial expertise and won’t disclose his supposed real estate or other investment success.
Rich Dad, Poor Dad contains much wrong advice, much bad advice, some dangerous advice, and virtually no good advice."
"However much money Kiyosaki did or didn't make in the past, he's making a fortune by selling the idea that he holds the key to your financial future. In one of the many logically creative passages late in the book, he raises the astonishing idea that Americans don't spend enough time trying to emulate the successful—there's just not enough hero worship out there. "It's one of the most powerful ways we learn that we often lose as adults," he writes. "We lose our heroes. We lose our naivete." If there's better proof of how wrong this is than the success of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I can't think of it."
- the explanation of how the rich earn passive income by acquiring assets rather than making a direct trade of time for money. It may seem obvious if you know it, but it's a basic and powerful concept.
- he recommends learning to read balance sheets and becoming financially literate which is, again, basic but important
- his advice to consider the importance of taxes and learn to structure your income to where you pay taxes but no more than you have to.
A lot of it's pretty obvious advice, but there is one thing he does well which is to motivate people to take control and become interested in learning to improve their financial situation. I think that generally outweighs the "bad" and "dangerous" advice in the book.
There are better books out there, but I think that the (unfortunately named) Rich Dad series takes more flak than it deserves.
Problem is that if you're a newbie, and these books are targetd at them, you have no way of sorting out the wheat from the chaff. So the book as a whole is simply not suitable for those that it was meant for.
Yeah... I don't know. I'm hesitant to come across as a big Kiyosaki advocate (I'm really pretty indifferent) but while I was able to think of several "wheat" examples, I can't really think of any chaff. Can you (or anyone) point out some specific areas where his advice is dangerous or just wrong?
Kiyosaki is a salesman and a motivational speaker. He has no financial expertise and won’t disclose his supposed real estate or other investment success.
Rich Dad, Poor Dad contains much wrong advice, much bad advice, some dangerous advice, and virtually no good advice."
John T. Reed, Harvard MBA, successful real estate investor http://www.johntreed.com/Kiyosaki.html
"However much money Kiyosaki did or didn't make in the past, he's making a fortune by selling the idea that he holds the key to your financial future. In one of the many logically creative passages late in the book, he raises the astonishing idea that Americans don't spend enough time trying to emulate the successful—there's just not enough hero worship out there. "It's one of the most powerful ways we learn that we often lose as adults," he writes. "We lose our heroes. We lose our naivete." If there's better proof of how wrong this is than the success of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I can't think of it."
http://www.slate.com/?id=2067175