I Finally Agree with Robert Kiyosaki

Filed in archive General on February 28, 2008

I have not read Rich Dad, Poor Dad or any other of Robert Kiyosaki's books, but I do read his columns for Yahoo Finance and I'm often annoyed by what he says. So when I got a review copy of his upcoming book Increase Your Financial IQ, I was ready to be annoyed some more. I'll review the book in a couple of weeks, but I've actually been enjoying it so far.

Kiyosaki spends too much time bitching about Nixon taking us off the gold standard in 1971, but here's the part of his book I'm in total agreement with. You've probably heard the concept of "pay yourself first"-otherwise, you'll pay everyone else and you'll never have money to save and invest. Well, Kiyosaki talks about when he and his wife had debt and weren't making much money, and how they truly did pay themselves first. In their view, what they owed themselves was the first bill to be paid. So not only did they pay themselves first, they did so regardless of who they owed and what trouble it might cause for them. Their thought process wasn't "we need to cut back on the saving so we can pay our bills" or "we need to start spending less so we don't have so many bills." Instead, their mindset was "paying ourselves is non-negotiable, so if we're going to pay everyone else, we need to make more money!" Then Kiyosaki talks about the many ways they scrapped for extra cash to pay the bills that other people were sending them.

I've talked in the past on this blog about my bias in this direction. I'm not interested in spending a lot of time worrying about how to cut back; I'm worried about how to get enough money to support a lifestyle that is comfortable for me. Not lavish, but comfortable. I love the thought of paying yourself as if you are the most important bill, the one that absolutely has to be paid. When you do that, you mentally give yourself no choice but to find more money to pay everyone else. On this, Kiyosaki and I are in total agreement.