It’s so insulting low effort BS that it’s almost sneering. I really don’t understand the phenomenon. I’ve had people earnestly recommend it to me as an “amazing book”. Is it the catchy name? (This is my strongest theory).
Here's a food for thought. Many people aren't that well read or critical thinkers, they just lap up anything served to them in a book. If many people are recommending something, consider it passing through your well-hardened filters/firewall.
It scratches the same itch as Amway. It legitimizes the economic system for some people who want to believe there is a special path to riches for them.
The bit about getting a mortgage on a rental property and charging enough rent to make the payments, pay the property taxes, pay some property manager to fix leaking pipes at 2am, and make a positive cash flow is a hoot. Just try that.
It may have worked when the book was written. The evidence for this would be all the profitable landleeches around us who successfully get rich for doing very little. The people who followed this advice are the reason why housing prices are so high and the advice no longer works because they are so high.
However, the economic environment tends to change to cancel out things like this, in the long run. Look at the recent adjustment in the yen carry trade - the one that was blamed for the stock market crash last week. Lots of rich trading firms were borrowing billions of dollars in yen, at low rates, lending the dollars at high rates, making a profit in yen. However, after many years of this, the price of yen adjusted 12% overnight and wiped out all the profits and then some, from the firms that were still doing it. They had to spend all their dollar profits to get enough yen to pay the loans back. (They could have continued the trade, but the movement spooked them as the yen's value wasn't as stable as they thought and further movements could cause even bigger losses)
In the mortgage/rental scenario, this correction happens when the housing market declines, due to governments no longer preventing the necessary new construction of dense housing complexes. A tipping point will eventually be reached where landleeches are exiting their positions to cut their losses, causing prices to decline further causing more losses to remaining landleeches, who exit their positions to cut them.
Yeah I never totally got how anyone ever thought that shit was possible. I will say though that having rental property that you own outright is fantastic. Depreciation by itself is unbelievable. I'll make more than the initial purchase price of the property just in tax refunds.
Right. If you have the blue collar skills to maintain your apartment and the pink collar skills to manage the tenant relationships yourself it can be a great business. My brother-in-law owns a number of apartments close to where he lives and he does great.
The human mind cannot tell between acquiring new mind-expanding knowledge and acquiring mind-expanding-knowledge-shaped nonsense. We use heuristics to evaluate the quality of input and heuristics can be fooled by adversarial agents. Because the mind can't tell the difference it gives the same pleasure response to both, but the nonsense is much easier to create and wins the race to the bottom.
It reminds me of the way people use LLMs where people can't tell the difference between a good answer and good-answer-shaped nonsense. See this guy's attempt to replicate neetcode.io with an LLM and the neetcode creator's response. The LLM user seems to have fooled themselves into thinking their LLM output is a useful step on the way to recreating neetcode, when it is not: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_cSLPv34xk
I like the book's message much like I enjoyed The Four Agreements; however, they both could have been a magazine articles instead of books.
My takeaway from Rich Dad Poor Dad is think about ownership and value creation instead of working for wages. I religiously follow having my assets buy my luxuries.
They're the same as in there the good takeaways could be written in an article.
Does the Four Agreements really need a book?
- Be impeccable with your word
- Do not take anything personally
- Do not make assumptions
- Always do your best
Poor Dad Rich Dad:
- Save Money in assets that grow (spend time learning about the assets)
- Live within your means
- Don't spend your income on luxuries, spend some of your asset growth on luxuries
- Try to be a business owner instead of a workers
