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Rich Dad Poor Dad... Worst Personal Finance Book of All Time?

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Re: Rich Dad Poor Dad... Worst Personal Finance Book of All Time?

#61

Post by j45 »

dev_jim wrote: post #26

I'm always fascinated as to why people on this board fervently defend scammy self-help books. Tim Ferris' completely phony 4-hour series provoked a similar reaction.

Nothings perfect, not even you, or I.

But, just because something isn't perfect, means it's no good. This mindset too, is troubling.

I think it's troubling to over-trivialize or generalize what any book can offer.

At the end of the day, it's up to us as individuals to take the good in everything. I found some things helpful in this book.

It's not at the core of my dominant world viewpoint, but helped me understand how to better (not perfectly, or completely) frame what I wanted in my future. It certainly didn't teach me how to get there.

Re: Rich Dad Poor Dad... Worst Personal Finance Book of All Time?

#62

Post by AlexBucataru »

huxley wrote: post #27
zavulon wrote: post #10

I disagree.. the most important message in the book is that business and entrepreneurship is the path to success, NOT being an employee and staying in the rat race. While it may be common sense to someone who's been in business for a while, or read a lot of similar literature, it's far from obvious to most people. I'm not ashamed to say Rich Dad Poor Dad has been one of the most influential books I've read in my life…

"the most important message in the book is that business and entrepreneurship is the path to success" No, it may be one of the best paths to wealth and independence --unless you're born into wealth already -- but it's not necessarily a path to success. My parents worked themselves to the bone in business, were repeatedly screwed by business partners and banks. It didn't give them one bit of gratification. My mother w…

Also, success is not necessarily correlated with happiness. Success is more about getting what you wanted, while happiness is more about wanting what you've got.

Re: Rich Dad Poor Dad... Worst Personal Finance Book of All Time?

#63

Post by krolley »

huxley wrote: post #27
zavulon wrote: post #10

I disagree.. the most important message in the book is that business and entrepreneurship is the path to success, NOT being an employee and staying in the rat race. While it may be common sense to someone who's been in business for a while, or read a lot of similar literature, it's far from obvious to most people. I'm not ashamed to say Rich Dad Poor Dad has been one of the most influential books I've read in my life…

"the most important message in the book is that business and entrepreneurship is the path to success" No, it may be one of the best paths to wealth and independence --unless you're born into wealth already -- but it's not necessarily a path to success. My parents worked themselves to the bone in business, were repeatedly screwed by business partners and banks. It didn't give them one bit of gratification. My mother w…

Your point is completely valid if it were a book about success. It is a personal finance book, and I assume most readers are trying to find out "how do I become rich?".

Re: Rich Dad Poor Dad... Worst Personal Finance Book of All Time?

#64

Post by TheCapn »

itmag wrote: post #40
dev_jim wrote: post #26

I'm always fascinated as to why people on this board fervently defend scammy self-help books. Tim Ferris' completely phony 4-hour series provoked a similar reaction.

Reading self help materials has been one of the major turning points in my life. Without self-help materials I would still have been a somewhat gifted kid but also a total mess of a human being. Thanks to self help I am becoming more and more self-realized every day. I am not going to downvote you, because I am genuinely curious what you have against Ferriss. Care to tell me more?

I'm not jumping on the hate-train necessarily, I've read the book a few years ago but I honestly didn't really feel anything from it. To me it was just a stack of papers that were confirming what I already knew.

To me the book and its "teachings" can be somewhat helpful to a person who doesn't have any financial history or were not brought up to understand the value of money and investments. For someone that was brought up and taught these lessons like me the book is a circlejerk that goes "look, someone agrees with my views!"

The book doesn't provide a whole lot more than financial common sense. To someone that hasn't had that sort of information before it might be interesting/revealing but to those who have it comes off as really dumb and get the sense of "well, no shit sherlock, I could've written a book like that". Its the same thing for people who look at social networks and go "I thought of that five years ago! I should be rich too!"

Don't get caught up if someone doesn't like the self-help books. I know nothing about you but it really depends on what kind of upbringing you had. To me I learned about money early, to others things like the time value of money are foreign and don't really learn of them until post-high school education. Reading books and learning of these topics isn't bad, it puts you in line with others who share their stories of success and the general principles they followed to achieve it.

Re: Rich Dad Poor Dad... Worst Personal Finance Book of All Time?

#65

Post by ghpdx »

When I read this book, I was a busser at a hotel restaurant. Some customer I was talking to had recommended it to me. He made me promise him I'd read it (seems kinda lame in retrospect).

I ignored a lot of it (like the risky real estate stuff), but what I took away from it was that you can't get rich working for someone else because you can only work so many hours in a day; you need to start your own business or invest to make lots of money. That seems like common sense now, but it wasn't for me at the time.

I'm not exaggerating when I say this-- I saved up and bought a Mac, bought books on HTML/CSS, PHP, Ruby, MySQL, Photoshop, Illustrator, design, etc., bootstrapped a SAAS company, and now I make a solid living off of it. This took me about 5 years because I started from scratch, but I can say I'm definitely a lot happier with my lifestyle now, than I was before I read the book, as cheesy as it was. Just my two cents.

Re: Rich Dad Poor Dad... Worst Personal Finance Book of All Time?

#66

Post by wisty »

maaku wrote: post #16
wisty wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the only valid point he has is that passive investments are a good thing, it's not a great personal finance book. You could learn a similar amount by looking up "investment" in a good dictionary.

The 'point' of the book is that this contradicts general beliefs of society. For example, that hard work is what gets one rich. Going from poor to rich does require hard work, but which work you choose to do matters far more than how hard you work at it. If you read HN then you already understand the premise of the book. But for society writ large "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" was a wakeup call to reexamine core values and li…

OK, I get it. It's for people who never have looked up "investment" in a good dictionary.

But that doesn't make it a good book. I mean, you can get that and more off a single page: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/personal-finance-for-d...

Or this one: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/making-millions-for-du...

Re: Rich Dad Poor Dad... Worst Personal Finance Book of All Time?

#67

Post by rmgraham »

jhamburger wrote: post #41
huxley wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the most important message in the book is that business and entrepreneurship is the path to success" No, it may be one of the best paths to wealth and independence --unless you're born into wealth already -- but it's not necessarily a path to success. My parents worked themselves to the bone in business, were repeatedly screwed by business partners and banks. It didn't give them one bit of gratification. My mother w…

I think history tends to be written by the winners when it comes to entrepreneurship. It's a lot harder- and a lot more luck involved- than many would admit.

It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure all of his books point out that 9/10 attempts result in failure; the trick being to see the failure early enough to recover and move onto the next attempt before it is too late.

Re: Rich Dad Poor Dad... Worst Personal Finance Book of All Time?

#68

Post by aculver »

ArbitraryLimits wrote: post #53
brador wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"what you can't afford your business can" Any more details on what this one means?

Tax breaks. A surprisingly large portion of the book is in praise (what's the opposite of a screed?) of having a company you control pay for your meals, car, and house so you avoid personal income tax.

Anyone familiar with this able to give a quick overview of the legality of this? I've looked into this before and it sounded to me like doing this too much (e.g. all your meals?) is dishonest and/or illegal.

Re: Rich Dad Poor Dad... Worst Personal Finance Book of All Time?

#69

Post by davidw »

tomp wrote: post #29
dev_jim wrote: post #26

I'm always fascinated as to why people on this board fervently defend scammy self-help books. Tim Ferris' completely phony 4-hour series provoked a similar reaction.

Why scammy? It's pretty common sense that these books do not offer any recipes for wealth creation, but they do offer something very important: the correct mindset for wealth creation. That is something that many many people lack and need. Finally, if you find it useless, why do you assume that everybody else does so as well?

> these books do not offer any recipes for wealth creation

Oh but they do: for the authors.

The problem with them is that there is little of substance and lots of feel-good hand waving. The good bits could usually be summed up on a page. Compare and contrast, with, say "Founders at Work" where each story is different, unique and interesting in its own way.

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