May 2022

Today, I’d like to tell you about a book that radically changed my way of thinking. For me, it is without a doubt, the book to read for anyone who wants to achieve financial freedom. It is the book “Rich Dad Poor Dad” by Robert T. Kiyosaki. This book, released in 2001, is still recognized as one of the best personal finance books of all time and I can only agree. 

The general idea of this book is that people spend many years in school but do not learn anything about money or investments. This in turn creates a lot of financial problems related to people learning to work for money instead of making their money work for them.

“Rich dad, poor dad” Introduction

As the name suggests, “Rich Dad Poor Dad” is the story of a child who is raised by two very different people. On the one hand, his biological father, who has a series of degrees and a good job with some security. On the other, the father of his best friend who did not finish school. Throughout the book, the author teaches us different lessons by comparing the situations and thoughts of his biological father (poor father) and his rich father. He uses these notions of poor and rich to explain the preferable behaviors to achieve financial freedom.

So it’s not just a theory book that will tell you what to do. It is written around the story of these two young people (the author and his best friend) who will learn to follow the footsteps of the rich father through their experiences. The latter will not simply give them the precepts to follow, he will make sure that our young people learn it through experience.

This book goes so far as to compare the ways of thinking of these two fathers. For example, the poor father will spend his life thinking that he cannot afford this or that, while the poor father will simply ask himself how he can afford it. 

In the rest of this article, we will see together the important lessons that this book has taught me.

Lesson 1: The rich don’t work for money, they make their money work for them.

This is one of the first and most important lessons of the book. It is necessary and even essential to make your money work for you. We work very hard to get that money, and why can’t that money work hard for us? Work for us?

That’s why the money you earn must be invested. If you leave it in a bank account, it doesn’t earn you anything, and in the end it’s useless. You have to invest it so that this money multiplies.

I find a rather telling image is that you have to see your money as soldiers. We have to make sure that our army grows while sending it to conquer new territories that will bring us more soldiers to enlarge our army. 

Tip: Make your money work for you..

Lesson 2: Develop Some Financial Literacy

The main problem with today’s economy is that schools don’t teach us the basics of getting rich. Have you ever taken a personal finance class? No, of course not… That’s kind of the point. They want to teach us to enter the world today as good employees, not as good employers.

There is never any mention of learning how to learn how to acquire assets that will generate income. And that’s the crux of the problem. We never learn in school the notions of assets and liabilities.

Here I’m going to remind you of our article on personal finance: 

In order to popularize these two purely accounting terms, imagine the balance sheet as a photograph of your assets at a specific moment.

• Assets are the things you own that generate money.
• Liabilities represent the debts you have, which result in an outflow of money.

Added to this balance sheet, we find the income statement, the latter represents a synthesis of all the inflows and outflows of money that have taken place during a certain period. We can distinguish between:

• Income: money coming in
• Expenses: money going out

Once these 4 concepts are clear, I invite you to review the graph below representing the different possible situations (Poor, middle class, rich). If you wish to go into more detail about this representation, I invite you to consult our article on this subject.

Lesson 3: Mind your own business!

The idea here is that you don’t necessarily have to quit your job at first. I would even say that you should keep your job, but that you should work on your own business during this time.

For example, Robert originally sold photocopiers. But he used his income to invest in real estate. Within 3 years his business allowed him to resign and continue working in/on his own business.

This is the only way to achieve financial freedom. You have to use your earned income to acquire assets that will generate money for you.

Lesson 4: Corporate Power

It may seem pretty obvious to you reading this blog but at the time it was literally a revelation to me. The very idea that a business is an instrument that the rich use to protect themselves in some way from taxes. 

If you understand this concept you will see that it is quite interesting to make a company and that the debate does not even arise:

Company	Employee
1. Earn money	1. Earn money
2. Spend money	2. Pay taxes
3. Pay taxes	3. Spend money

The company is really the ideal way for you to pay yourself first. In this way, you make the necessary expenses and only afterwards, on the remaining money, you will be taxed. 

An employee, on the other hand, receives his salary from which the tax is deducted directly. It is only what is left after taxes that he can use.

Lesson 5: Work to learn, don’t work for money

Our young entrepreneurs learned this the hard way in the book. But it’s also what allowed the author to start his first business at the age of 9.

Robert and Mike (his best friend) asked Mike’s father (a rich father) to teach them how to make money. The way he teaches them is quite interesting. For 3 weeks he makes them work for a miserable salary in one of his stores. It wasn’t until Robert wanted to quit that he got his first lesson. Rich father taught them to see a job as an opportunity to learn something new. So the decision to quit a job should not be about “I’m not making enough” but rather “I’m not learning enough.” 

This is also how he pushed the children to find a way to create their own source of income. This they did by setting up a kind of library for their classmates by collecting old comics. They even outsourced the management by paying Mike’s sister to do it for them. Real entrepreneurs!

Later, Robert decided to join Xerox simply to learn to overcome his fear of rejection and become a better salesman. Once he did, he quit and went back to his business.

Some key lessons from the book

• You are only the image of your thoughts 
• Being employed is ultimately a short-term situation for a long-term problem
• A slave will remain a slave, even if he is paid a fortune.
• Why climb the corporate ladder when you can own a company directly?

Conclusion

The book “Rich dad, Poor dad” is simply a must-read for anyone who wants to improve their personal finances. I don’t think I can thank the author enough for everything he has done for me. It has allowed me to completely change the way I look at money.

If your goal is to achieve financial independence, then a first step should be to read this book that will help you get the right mindset. 

And you, have you ever read this book? What did you think of it? Do you have any other books to recommend? Don’t hesitate to tell us about it in comments!