Chris’s Notes on Cashflow Quadrant: Rich Dad’s Guide to Financial Freedom, Robert T. Kiyosaki and Sharon L. Lechter, Warner Books, April, 2000. I recommend this book for the way it twisted my head around.

There aren’t any “how to” details in this book, but it still had some pretty valuable ideas in it that really changed my thinking and inspired me about what’s possible:

• There are four main ways to make money: as an employee, being self-employed, running a business and investing.
• Our society has trained the middle and lower classes that success looks like getting a good job and being a good little consumer. I’d long recognized the cycle of get into college->get a good job->save for your kids’ college education->they do it all over again for their kids, but I didn’t know what alternative I had.
• The alternatives, according to this book, are running a business and/or investing. Specifically, this book really pushed running a business to fund investments, mostly for the tax benefits. My own thoughts are that having a business to fund investments is the absolute right thing to do. However, having a business that generates extra money to invest is easier said than done. If that’s your plan, you should go away and do that first, then figure out the investing thing later in your leisure by the pool.
• Folks that run their own business or invest have a reasonable chance for financial independence, whereas employees and the self-employed do not.
• Financial independence has a specific definition: having more passive monthly income than your monthly expenses. Only when’s it’s passive income, i.e. you don’t have to do the work to generate the income, do your finances allow you to pursue whatever activities you want, regardless of their income generating abilities, e.g. write a novel or home school your kids.

In general, I really like the way that Kiyosaki writes, although it’s very marketing-style, so it turns me on and off at the same time. What I like is that he writes in a very personal way, talking about his two fathers, one trapped in the rat race like most of us and the other who’d learned how to become financially independent. He uses examples of his fathers’ behavior to illustrate his points and talks a lot about how be changed his own thinking to break himself out of the cycle.

On the other hand, it seems like his major business is selling financial education-related materials to fuel his own wealth, so right away you have to suspect his motives. Also, his books are light on details, although he’s happy to use them to point you at other produces that he or his partners have produced for more information. That’s not a business model that respects the needs or intelligence of his audience. Still, if you ignore that and look for the ideas, I find his writing useful.

In general, I suspect all members of the financial education market, from authors to radio talk show hosts and everyone in between. When I obtain financial independence, I don’t plan on teaching anyone but my own friends and family. Why would anyone do otherwise except to fleece the public?

And then, having said that, I realize that every single book I’ve written, I wrote because I had a burning story to tell; I couldn’t not write it. My motivation to write novels is grounded in my need to take my writing into a completely different direction w/o the requirement of generating an income stream. So it’s likely that at least *some* of the folks in the financial education market are in it for love, but how can you tell which ones?

Further, it’s not generally true that “them that know, don’t tell.” I know that I know how to write real software and how the technologies that form the topics of my writings and teachings really work, so at the very least, I’m the exception to that rule. However, there are an awful lot of exceptions, like all of my friends in the Windows developer education industry, so I reject the rule out of hand for at least a significant percentage of participants in any given field of education (certainly a significant percentage of them conform to the rule, of course, and those are likely to out number the ones that are the exception).

However, all of us in the Windows developer education industry make our living on education, not on the technology itself. We’ve chosen education because it’s more lucrative then being a practitioner. (This may help explain why elementary school teachers choose their field: can you think of a place that they can make more money on basic readin’, ‘ritin’ and ’rithmatic than as a teacher?)

So, if it’s the case that education is more lucrative than practice, why should I buy someone’s financial book, since they’ve obviously decided that selling me a book is more profitable than practicing what they’re preaching. Further, the real-time markets have the built-in handicap that when a technique for really making money is widely put into use, the market adjusts for it, bringing the returns for that technique back in line with the market as a whole. If I discovered a new way to make real money, publishing how it works is the last thing that I want to do. Definitely, those kinds of books, like The Motley Fool’s Investment Guide, are not what I want to put my trust into.

Things I find I can trust more are books that inspire me, like Rich Dad, Poor Dad, or change the way I look at things, like Fooled by Randomness, or help me to establish a foundation of knowledge, like Investing for Dummies or Learn to Earn. These are books that don’t promise to make me rich (except the Rich Dad, Poor Dad books, but I’ve learned to discount that promise : ), but that help me align my brain cells so that I can take control of my own financial health.

So, all of this boils down to “Be a skeptic” from the Epilogue to Effective COM, furthering my belief that the ability to learn how one system works, e.g. COM, can be effectively translated into learning how another system works, e.g. investing. And so what’s my motivation for this writing and others like it? It’s purely selfish, I assure you. Writing something clarifies my thinking and posting it gets me access to, and feedback from, like-minded folks that can help clarify my thinking even more.