Rich Dad: “The Rich Don’t Work for Money”
According to Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, “The poor and middle class work for money. The rich have money work for them.”
Robert Kiyosaki tells a story of working for his rich Dad, who paid him 10 cents an hour, for doing tasks around one of his shops. Robert got fed up with the low pay and rough treatment after three weeks, and demanded a raise.
In the process, Robert was taught the following lessons:
1. Don’t accept mediocre circumstances just because they’re handed to you.
2. Making more money doesn’t help, if you don’t have financial literacy. As income increases, most people increase their expenses, and end up with nicer stuff, but no more financial freedom than when they earned less.
3. Most of us become enslaved to money, and then get angry at our situation. Or at our boss. But our boss isn’t the one exploiting us; we’re exploiting ourselves (by trading time for money, and by working for money, instead of letting the money work for us).
Robert’s Rich Dad goes on to say that most of us are ruled by two emotions – FEAR and DESIRE. These two emotions do most of our thinking for us.
We are motivated by the FEAR of:
•Being broke
•Not having a job
•Not following the path that most people we know are following
•Losing whatever security (money) it is that we do have
We are also motivated by GREED, or DESIRE. The DESIRE to:
•Have more money, for money’s sake (hoarding / financial security).
•Have more money, so as to buy more STUFF. More LIABILITIES that just take money out of your pocket, without working for you. In fact, a lot of us are guilty of feeling wealthier as we amass more stuff. In actuality, we’re amassing liabilities instead of assets, and as such are getting no wealthier.
The cycle that most of us go through over the years ends up looking like this:
Go to work Pay bills
when salary increases –> bills increase
(because you get more stuff. Bigger house. Another car. More credit card debt. More kids, and therefore more expenses. Nicer vacations. Nicer gifts during birthdays and Christmas.)
The moral of the story?
A JOB IS A SHORT TERM SOLUTION TO A LONG-TERM PROBLEM.
Don’t work for money. Work to learn. But not learning the stuff they taught us in school; learning about how to make money work for you.
Picture this (great analogy from the book):
•A donkey pulling a cart
•The owner dangling a carrot in front of the donkey’s nose
•The owner knows where they’re going, but the donkey has no idea.
•It is simply following the carrot
•So at the end of the day, all the donkey gets is a carrot, while the owner actually gets something concrete accomplished.
•Each day, there will be a new carrot, and a new cart for the donkey.
•This is the 9-to-5 experience. This is working for someone else.
