עוד כמה פרטים על קיוסאקי ועל "אבא עשיר, אבא עני"

מאת: אראל

אל:

מתוך האתר:
http://www.johntreed.com/Kiyosaki.html

‘Made me think about my finances’
The most common favorable comment I get about Kiyosaki from those who generally agree with my analysis is that “He got me to think about my finances.” That’s pretty lame.

The IRS makes you think about your finances every April 15th. You have to think about your finances whenever you fill out a loan or credit-card application . I also think about my finances frequently when I pay bills or receive income. People who are unhappy with their financial lives—which is probably the typical Kiyosaki fan—probably think about their finances every time they get into their shabby car or return to their unsatisfactory home (e.g., living with parents, bad neighborhood, too small, etc.).

I think these “made me think about finances” comments are inarticulate at best and dishonest at worst. What is really going on is a lot of people are schlepping along doing a half-ass job of managing the financial aspects of their lives. Rich Dad Poor Dad slaps them up side the head and tells them to clean up their acts. That’s good, but the book goes on to deliver a pack of lies that make getting rich seem much easier than it really is and make education sound much less valuable than it really is. Basically, people want to get rich quick without effort. Kiyosaki is just the latest in a long line of con men who pander to that naive longing.

Can the ordinary person get rich? Yes
Is it as easy as Kiyosaki makes it sound? Not even close.
Can it be done as fast as Kiyosaki says? Nope.
Is education as worthless as Kiyosaki says? Every pertinent study has shown that the more education you have, the higher your net worth and income. Also, educated people live longer, have fewer divorces, better health, and so forth.

On the other hand, the public-school system is an easy target for criticism. It is generally run by union bureaucrats who graduated at the bottom of their college classes. Colleges are also subject to criticism for letting students spend five or more years getting low-income educations in subjects like philosophy and social work. Wisely-chosen education—defined broadly as reading books, talking to successful people in the field you are interested in, attending courses, and subscribing to trade publications is generally the highest return you can earn on your money and time. Kiyosaki is just telling lazy and/or stupid students a line of bull that lets them avoid responsibility for their poor academic performance and gives them a convenient scapegoat to blame for their lousy financial situations. There is also more value to education than just its financial rewards. If you like philosophy and are willing to take a vow of poverty, you ought to study philosophy. Not everyone suffers from Kiyosaki’s need to impress people with how much money he has made (or claims to have made).

....

Money is all that matters
On page 14 he approvingly quotes “rich dad” as saying “Money is power.” [Since I wrote this analysis, Kiyosaki has changed the layout of the book making these page numbers wrong for subsequent editions. They are correct for my edition, which says published by TechPress, Inc. and has 1997 and 1998 copyrights.] On page 92, he tells of his “rich dad” keeping him waiting for long periods—when he was nine years old!! “He was ignoring me on purpose. He wanted me to recognize his power and desire to have that power for myself one day.” On page 172, he says, “I have found the principles of finding value are the same regardless if it’s real estate, stocks,...or a new spouse...”

On page 154, Kiyosaki says “the reason you want to have rich friends” is to get inside stock market information that you can make low-risk profits. He ends that discussion with the sentence, “That is what friends are for.” That is the narrowest, most mercenary definition of friendship I have ever seen. I doubt Kiyosaki is the only person who feels this way about his friends, but he may be the only one dumb enough to say it in a book.

Although his family was not rich, he attended a predominantly wealthy elementary school because of an anomaly in the school-district boundaries. The wealthy kids had newer toys and refused to invite Kiyosaki and his friend to parties, telling Kiyosaki it was because they were “poor kids.” Sounds like he was scarred deeply by that humiliation and has lived his whole life since trying to prove to some rude nine-year olds from the 1950s that he now has the money to be worthy of their party invitations. He told Meet the Street that he has never been back to Hawaii. I suspect such a visit would help him get rid of the demons from his childhood.

How much money does Kiyosaki have?
A number of people have accused me of being jealous of Kiyosaki—I guess because they think he has more money than I have. Others have said they are going to follow him because he is fabulously wealthy and that’s what they want to be.

How do we know this?

I know approximately what my net worth is. But I have no idea of what Robert Kiyosaki’s net worth is. Neither does anyone else.

He implies he has money. He has had four books about how to get rich on the business best seller list. He brags about owning a Porsche, Mercedes, Rolex watch, $400 golf club. The Honolulu Star Bulletin —the newspaper where Kiyosaki grew up—wrote a puff piece about him. You can see it at http://starbulletin.com/2000/07/10/features/story1.html . In it, Kiyosaki says a number of things that imply he is rich. For example,

“I’m free to do exactly what I want, when I want, where I want. I can stop working if I want to. Money buys me freedom.”

The article says “Kiyosaki’s got his…” and that he lives in a $3.5 million dollar home in Phoenix.

A real-estate broker visitor to this site ran a computer search on Kiyosaki and said Kiyosaki owned two properties in Maricopa County, AZ (Phoenix). The assessor’s records ( http://www.maricopa.gov/Assessor/ParcelApplication/Detail.aspx?ID=164-14-005 ) showed a purchase price (10/6/99) of $1.2 million and a “full cash value” of $980,000 on his residence, 62 Biltmore Estates Circle, Phoenix, AZ 85016. Neither value is any slouch, but it ain’t $3.5 million. A visitor to this Web site who lives in Phoenix said Kiyosaki spent a lot of money on improvements finishing around April, 2002. A caller in July of 2003 said the house was worth about $2.5 to $3 million then. The other property ( a five-room house built in 1979, 2,300 square feet, 1809 East Lane Avenue, Phoenix, AZ 85020 ) had a current “full cash value” of $171,500. He purchased that 8/8/91. It was the house he moved out of when he bought the Biltmore Estates house.

A visit to the Maricopa County Recorders Web site http://recorder.maricopa.gov/recdocdata/Frame.asp?rec=19990929308& pg=1&cls=RecorderDocuments&suf=&sar=UnOfficial&bid=&naf=1& bk=0&rec2=&pgs=&map=&bdt=1/1/1900&edt=10/9/2001& nm=KIYOSAKI+KIM+L+ETAL&set=250&cde=GRNT%2BDEED&lnk=1&Pages=2 shows that he bought the Biltmore home from an odd home seller—the National Model Railroad Association. You can see at the Web site that the down payment was originally $23,000, but that was crossed out and $300,000 was written in. The recording number from the assessor’s records is 990929308 10/6/99.

My search of the Maricopa County recorders office by Internet found a bunch of documents related to Kiyosaki. You can see that list at http://recorder.maricopa.gov/recdocdata/GetRecDataPgDn.asp?rec=0& nm=Kiyosaki&sar=UnOfficial&bid=&bdt=1/1/1900&edt=10/9/2001&cde=&set=250&lnk=1

Below are some deeds to Kiyosaki. I do not know Phoenix real estate so I would be interested in hearing from anyone who is familiar with these properties who can interpret whether they support or refute the notion that Kiyosaki is a big success.
http://recorder.maricopa.gov/recdocdata/Frame.asp?rec=19920657298& pg=1&cls=RecorderDocuments&suf=&sar=UnOfficial&bid=&naf=0&bk=0& rec2=&pgs=&map=&bdt=1/1/1900&edt=10/9/2001&nm=Kiyosaki&set=250&cde=WAR+DEED&lnk=1&Pages=2

http://recorder.maricopa.gov/recdocdata/Frame.asp?rec=19930001842& pg=1&cls=RecorderDocuments&suf=&sar=UnOfficial&bid=&naf=0&bk=0&rec2=& pgs=&map=&bdt=1/1/1900&edt=10/9/2001&nm=Kiyosaki&set=250&cde=WAR+DEED&lnk=1&Pages=2

I once investigated best-selling real-estate author Robert Allen who wrote Nothing Down . At first, he claimed to own his home. But when I checked the address which appeared on IRS liens filed against him, it was nonexistent—no house at that address. When I again asked where he owned his home, he admitted, “I rent.” I have the conversation on tape.

One of my MBA classmates, Paul Bilzerian, became a very successful corporate raider for a time. He stood silent while others claimed he was a wiz who had made $150 million in Florida real estate before age 30. I called him up to ask if that were true. He said I should read the article in the Wall Street Journal carefully . Indeed, it said he was “reported” to have made that much and all Paul would say in the article was, “That’s a good guess.” In other words, Paul was pointing out to me that it was not he who said he had made all that money. Paul subsequently was the subject of a Forbes story. They said they investigated his purported Florida real-estate profits and could not find a “trace” of him in Florida real estate. He later got into trouble with the law and was the subject of a 60 Minutes segment about his mansion in Florida that creditors could not get to after he declared bankruptcy.

According to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin , “Kiyosaki won’t say how much he is worth or in what he’s invested.” Kiyosaki claims, “I own companies. I’m a major shareholder in oil and mining companies, plus real estate companies. I have intellectual property companies.” But he won’t identify any of them. Why? As you will read below, one of my readers checked Kiyosaki’s claim that he was a major shareholder out in a securities industry data base and found not a trace of him in spite of the fact that major shareholders are required by law to be identified. If he is a “major” shareholder, it is in minor corporations so small that their shares are not traded publicly.

Kiyosaki says, “I keep my holdings private. You know why that is? Lawsuits. If you have money, you get sued.”

Let me get this straight. Kiyosaki says he is rich, that he “makes millions of dollars,” and is about as high profile about his wealth as you can get about it—best-selling how-to-get-rich books, appearances on TV shows like Oprah , interviews to daily papers and national magazines. Yet he won’t disclose any details because he doesn’t want people to know he has money. Huh? Not only is the guy a B.S. artist, he insults our intelligence.

Somebody needs to give Kiyosaki a book on how to be low profile. I’m sure it has a chapter that says going on Oprah to discuss your best-selling book on getting rich is not a good way to prevent would-be litigants from knowing you have money. Kiyosaki is, in fact, shouting from the rooftops that he has money. He just refuses to prove it. Or to let us investigate how he got it if he does have it.

I have always felt that implying you have money was worse than revealing your net worth. When I was in grad school, I took a labor relations course where actual union leaders were in every other seat with us MBAs. One said that one of the things they love about employers is when they keep earnings secret. That allows the union to tell the employees that the company is “getting rich on their backs.” That, in turn, causes the employees to vote for the union. Kiyosaki’s implying he is wealthy, but refusing to disclose how wealthy, will almost certainly cause would-be litigants and others to overestimate his net worth, thereby increasing the chances of his being sued over what they would be if he were more forthcoming.

Many small businesspeople adopt grandiose company names, like Pritchco Interplanetary, that make them sound much larger than they really are. I tell my readers not to do that because such names encourage lawsuits. I encourage small real-estate investors to use their own name, because people are more inclined to sue big-sounding corporations than an individual.

I suspect the real reason Kiyosaki refuses to disclose any evidence of his purported wealth is either

• It is much smaller than his followers imagine
• He did not get it the way he implies—for example, his wealth may come almost entirely from telling people how to get wealthy and he may not have been wealthy himself until he told people how to get wealthy
• He achieved wealth in an unethical or illegal way
• All of the above

For the record, I created another page to address the jealousy issue. Click here to see it.

On 1/14/02, a reader told me Kiyosaki was more forthcoming about his wealth at http://www.thestreet.com/funds/meetthestreet/10006507.html . Indeed, in an interview at that Web site, he says his net worth is “between $50,000,000 and $100,000,000 depending on the day.” (I don’t believe that. He also says he was bankrupt and homeless in 1985. More about that later.) So which is it—Kiyosaki will not talk about his wealth because he doesn’t want to be sued or he will give figures, locations of his properties, and the nature of his corporations as he does in the Meet the Street interview? What happened to the lawsuit threat?