Kiyosaki starts the book by delving into some of the relationships between business, government, and the Federal Reserve, as well as looking at a time line for the financial crisis of 2007/2008. Delving is maybe too strong a word, since he really don't go any deeper than stating or implying there is relationship, and since you (the reader) are not rich, you are excluded. Chapter 1 is rhetorically titled "Can Obama Save the world?" and the obvious answer is no. I respect Kiyosaki for giving the message that you have to save yourself. He states that "Personally, I don't expect government or big business to save me. I simply watch what the powers that be actually do, and respond accordingly." According to Kiyosaki the key to saving ourselves lies in financial education, specifically on the topics of Taxes, Debt, Inflation, and Retirement.
Chapter two talks about the conspiracy in education. Kiyosaki spends a lot of time on the difference between two schools he attended in Hawaii growing up, one predominately rich and one predominately poor, then he goes on to say (in a round about way) that neither teaches a true financial education. He's spends a lot of time promoting an "us vs them" mentatliy in just the first two chapters, so I was kind of caught off gaurd by that.
Kiyosaki introduces his first "new" rule of money in chapter two as well, namely that "Money is knowledge." He uses a stock trade as an example of how knowledge can be turned into money rather easily. I hope the fact that you can leverage your knowledge of things to make a profit is not news to people, and has been around for as long as there have been trade and merchants. The kind of knowledge you need is much deeper than a firm speculation about the direction of stock. I realize that these first five chapters are more setup than actual information, but I hope to see some better example of how "money being made of out nothing - nothing but knowledge. " The statement itself is a little simplistic, usually you need some sort of cash or credit or property to make a transaction happen, even if you are using leverage.
There are a lot of unesssary diagrams and lists in the book. So far none of them have been useful. The text digram showing the relationship between the old school he attended and the new school was particularlly un-enlightening since neither made a difference in his money education.
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