Retire Young, Retire Rich

Robert T. Kiyosaki with Sharon L. Lechter

I have been a fan of Robert Kiyosaki for a while now and so even before writing this review, I know in which direction this is headed.

Firstly I took a long time to read this book , this is not a book which you can just speed read and leave it at that, the main purpose in reading this is to get something of value. Something that you can take home and apply to your life.

Even if I don't get rich or retire young :-) reading this book did give me a different perspective to things. Time and again he speaks about leverage. in fact if you see the Table of contents HERE. You can see that 11 of the 21 chapters have titles beginning with "LEVERAGE" .

This book basically shuttles between his varied experiences over the past 20 years investing in real estate and changes that he had to do in himself and his thinking (or as per the book "Context") to get ahead in life.

I found the first half of the book very interesting, where he exhorts a possibility thinking, so that we do not limit ourselves by our context. I particularly like his way of putting things and dividing people into 4 classes depending on the stream of their income or cashflow> i.e the Cashflow quadrant > which defines whether you are an

1) Salaried employee 2) Self employed

3) Investor 4) Business man

Robert goes on explaining on why it is better to earn income from the latter 2 classes than the former, and why we must try to move to the latter two. Logically speaking he is not too off the mark but only if we had the GUTS.

In general I found this book pretty useful, and infact very motivating, especially some of the examples of real estate investing are really interesting. The latter part of the book was pretty DRAB, where he goes on to explain about the futures and options industry. Also he blatantly advertises his other books time and again in his writings.

If you want to read a scathing review of Robert Kiyosaki and his books have a look here. I do not agree with whatever he has written but it just gives you a counterview. Copy of the original post here.