Rich Dad's Cashflow Quadrant(Paperback)

Robert Kiyosaki does an excellent job of bringing the financial world to my level. I am able to understand what he is talking about and why it is important. This is his second book. I think the first one is like a wake call, or a warning. This second book begins to explain what individuals need to do to become financially free.This book talks about the seven levels of investors: Those with nothing to invest, borrowers, savers, "smart" investors, long term investors, sophisticated investors, and capitalists. Knowing which type of investor you are allows you to see where you need to improve to get to where you want to be. But one of the biggest themes in this novel is the message to take action now. The more action one takes, the more they learn, and the more successful they can become.I encourage you to buy this book, because I plan on reading it again and I think if you read it, you will also probably read it again.

I enjoyed the first Rich Dad, Poor Dad book. Although it would be nice to have more specifics, I found the ideas contained in Kiyosaki's philosophy to be helpful. If you enjoyed the first book, then you will want to purchase this book. But if the first book did nothing for you, then stay away. I found the most helpful idea in the book to be the idea that to become rich, you must first BE rich. You must first live--or be--a rich person (not a person with an expensive house, expensive car, and expensive lifestyle). To do that is is to do--to do the things that rich people do. To do like the rich is only a show, it is only on the surface. You must first be rich in a Zen like way. You must not be afaird and let your emotions and the emotions and ignorance of others guide your financial decisions. Be rich, be unemotional about money, be sure of your decisions.

I bought Rich Dad Poor Dad and The Cashflow Quadrant. Basically the author shows you the typical poor/middle class financial statement with Income coming in from a job, and going out thru the expense column - meanwhile racking up lots of liabilities in the process, and accruing no assets. (Author's Definitions: ASSETS PUT MONEY INTO YOUR POCKET AND LIABILITIES TAKE MONEY OUT OF YOUR POCKET) Then the author shows the same thing for a wealthy person, only this person uses their money to rack up Income Producing Assets which then create an income stream into your Income column. Eventually, these multiple Asset Income Streams will remove the need for the Job Income Stream, and now you can concentrate on nurturing and growing your assets, and creating even more income from them. The Cash Flow Quadrant while touching on everything above, also goes further to identify 4 different Quadrants that people normally fall into: Work for an Employer, Self Employed, Business System Owner, Investor. It goes into lots of detail about the various quadrants, how to get the most out of each of them, and how to either incorporate a little of the 2 right quadrants into your current quadrant, or how to eventually move to the two right quadrants altogether. EXCELLENT!

I read Rich Dad Poor Dad which was great and got me hooked on the series, and that was the perfect warm-up for the Cashflow Quadrant. I learned more about the way the world of money REALLY works in the 2 days it tooks me to read this book than I have in my entire life. I'm 28 now, and if I had read the Rich Dad series before I ever got my hands on a credit card, I'd be a millionaire by now. Chapter 6 of this book especially blew my mind. It's very much like the movie "The Matrix". I had no idea what was really going on in the real world before I read the first two Rich Dad books and they opened my eyes up to the systems the rich use. The problem is, most people that are not born rich feel like they can not achieve great wealth, but it is very attainable if you have the knowledge and the courage to act. These books are priceless to me, and I'm trying to get my parents to read them and break out of their "Industrial Age" way of thinking that has kept them in debt their whole lives with very little saved for retirement. Read Rich Dad Poor Dad first, because it lays the foundation perfectly for this book. You may hear people complain that there is too much repetition in these books, and there is to some extent, but it only reinforces the concepts they are trying to teach you. I don't mind that all, since that's the way you remember things, just like studying for a test. Don't listen to naysayers, these books are gold!!

I am a big fan of RK so take this with a grain of salt if you hate the guys guts.First off, I've been studying money books for almost two years. Most of them were for the middle class which told you to play it safe and diversify. Answers were little and fear was great. Basically, if you had a lot of time, you could at least retire adequately from those books.So then I found RK last May and what a change! This was exactly what I was looking for: not people who couldn't walk the talk but people who had done it and done it well. Understand that RK and his wife lost most of their money and had to live with a friend (it's in their second or third book) but there's no shame in this per se as some people feel. This guy is basically telling you about his mistakes, at the risk of being attacked, and letting you avoid them.I've played CASHFLOW 101 about 30 times and moved on to 202 and have played it about a dozen times now. THe group I am with is positive and training their minds to see the invisible. One guy has already started to do r/e deals in Calif and while he is still looking around in a tough market like the Bay Area, he's moving along.RK's books are really about opening your mind to the possibilities as cliche' as it sounds. Once you decide to specialize in a particular investment vehicle (i.e. real estate, MLMS, stocks, etc), you will need to get the information from other sources.In CQ, RK covers the different boxes we all live in and how you can get out of the bad ones to the good ones. He also spends more time in helping you exercise your basic financial acumen.The important things RK's books do is give you smidgens of various fin. vehicles and, more importantly, teaches you to believe that the possibilities are out there.Let me stress that again: the possibilities ARE out there. The problem is: most Americans have trained their mind to believe there are very few and they cannot get them so they repeat this vicious circle. That's the biggest problem I've noticed since training my mind and learning.You've got to believe and you have to start seeing the possibilities: or, seeing the invisible as RK calls it. Once you start doing that, you're on your way.