The one issue I don't have with Robert Kiyosaki

One of the big criticisms that's always leveled at Kiyosaki is that he's long on encouragement and short on practical ideas. Well, that's pretty true. You can read a great overview of the book here at Adventures in Money Making. Kiyosaki is mainly trying to give people an insight into the psychological mindset of how a person who made themselves wealthy would think, and it's much the same message as The Millionaire Next Door (about people who did make themselves wealthy) - you shouldn't buy things you can't afford, you should strike out for yourself, and you should live according to your principles and not what you think someone of your income should be doing. That's all fine.

Then there's kind of a disconnect between what Kiyosaki says you should do in the books, and what he says you should do specifically. It seems to me that the best way to accumulate wealth in his mindset is to either buy assets (like real estate) that create money, or to create an asset (like a business) that creates money. This is where he and The Millionaire Next Door begin to part ways. The Millionaire Next Door comes to the conclusion that being in business for yourself is the way that most wealthy people get there, but if you read Kiyosaki's Yahoo column, he talks a lot about gold (which just sits there) and disdains mutual funds and stocks (which seem to fit well with his idea of money that makes money, but he doesn't think they're fast enough.) So that doesn't make much sense there. I realize that owning a successful real estate or business empire makes money faster than a mediocre mutual fund, but investing is one good step towards creating a mindset that believes saving for the future is more important than living it up today.

The principal issue, I think, is this: Most People Don't Have Any Good Ideas. They hear that owning your own business is a great thing to do, but they don't have any idea of what they want to do. Or they don't have the desire to go out and find something that they think would make money. This is why stocks and mutual funds are easy and appealing - someone else has already thought up the business and got it going, and now all you have to do is buy part of it, or tiny parts of many businesses in the case of a mutual fund. You can do all that while holding down a different job, and not getting up at 2AM to fix somebody's overflowing toilet. Even owning real estate is a comparatively easy idea to actually thinking up a new business that works - I'll give it that. (Not an easy job, note.)

I'm not really sympathizing with the people who complain that Kiyosaki doesn't provide any follow-through. He's just providing a change of mentality - are you then going to complain that he doesn't personally show you how to file for incorporation or retain good employees? No, there are a thousand books about how to run the business. You're not supposed to get a complete handbook of action out of him - you're just supposed to get inspired to Do Something. Evidently, he believes the actual ideas will follow.