I recently read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, by Robert Kiyosaki and I really was not too impressed with what I had found. Some of the advice was just not very good and Kiyosaki did not much of any concrete plan or any steps people can take to directly be wealthy. Instead he used anecdotal stories to illustrate financial concepts that he has learned throughout his life. I decided I would give Kiyosaki a second chance and picked up a copy of Cashflow Quadrant that I had picked up at the library book sale for ($.25). On a side note, library book sales are a great way to get financial books for just pennies. It’s amazing what they have.

The book focuses on breaking free of what Kiyosaki refers to as the “rat race” by moving your sources of income from being an employee or self employee to being an investor or a business owner, where you generate passive income, rather than having to work for money. He says that moving from the left side of the graph to the right side of the graph will enable us to have more time to spend doing the things that we really enjoy.

So what’s the cash flow quadrant?. In essence, it’s a two dimensional graph like the kind you saw in your high-school math classes. The graph is separated with two axis’s creating four unique “quadrants” in which people earn money from. On the left side, you have the employee and self-employed quadrants, and on the right side, you have the business owner and the investor quadrants. It’s not much more than an illustration, but it does do a good job dividing into the different sorts of income that people can have.

In the book he describes each of the quadrants, and what motivates people who are in each quadrant. He tells us that we can be successful regardless of which quadrant we are in, but he recommends that we try to move from being an employee to being an investor and a business owner so that we can have more free time to do what we love.

The book really provided some unique insights as to what motivates different types of people, but there weren’t really any detailed instructions on how you can build a business, or how you can move from the right side to the left side of the spectrum as Kiyosaki invests. It was certainly an interesting read, but it was very repetitive of “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” and didn’t have any concepts that were remarkably new and insightful. Kiyosaki also describes a number of common sense things that we should do with our money, but many other financial books are also guilty of that sin.

Would I recommend this book? If you haven’t read Rich Dad, Poor Dad it might be worth some of your free time, but probably not a whole lot of it. Maybe get the audio tape, it’ll take less time to listen to than read. It doesn’t really offer any steps to take to become financially wealthy, and that’s what most people need, if you are more of an academic when it comes to money, the idea of the cash flow quadrant might be interesting to read about, but if you are looking for a financial plan to become wealthy, this is not the book for you.



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