Our Shared Concerns
This chapter was pretty short as it mostly talks about how Trump and Kiyosaki shared the same concerns and belief about various economics issues by using a lot of references from their past books. This time they were in Dallas, Texas where The Learning Annex’s Real Estate Expo was taking place on February 19, 2006. They first showed this diagram to explain how the country has $72 trillion worth of off-balance sheet obligations:
They describe how the country could simply print more money, but that would cause hyperinflation which wouldn’t really solve the problem. Now the example they used for this was pretty incredible when I think about. They talked about how back in the 1930’s the German dollar had pretty much lost its value due to the government printing so much money. Apparently, a common story that was told to reflect this was how there was a lady who went to see a baker to buy some bread and to pay for it she brought with her a wheelbarrow that was full of money (Try imagining that happening today). She went inside the store and once she decided on what she wanted to buy she went back out to get some money to pay for it and then realized that she had been robbed. The thing is the thief didn’t take any of the money, but rather just the wheelbarrow. I’ve always been taught in school about how simply printing more money would be bad as it would cause inflation, but for some reason reading this example makes it so much more apparent.
Afterwards, they talked about how too many people are expecting things to be handed to them, such as pensions, rather than taking action to take care of themselves and used the following diagram:
They want people to lose the “entitlement†mentality and to do this people need to educate themselves and to try different things. The Albert Einstein quote was used where he defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.†Robert Kiyosaki thinks that a good example of this is how the education system does not teach kids about money and used his “Cashflow Quadrant†picture to explain this which looked this:
E – Stands for employee
S – Stands for small-business person, self-employed or specialist
B – Stands for big-business owners such as Donald Trump
I – Stands for Investors.
Kiyosaki mentions how the education system is teachings kids a lot about E’s and S’s, but not B’s and I’s. Trump shares the same concern in a different view it seems where he thinks too many people are in a “goupthink†mentality where everyone follows the same herd. He wants to help people break out of this groupthink mentality to teach people how to think and take care of themselves.
To me, for the most part this chapter felt like it was trying to advertise Donald Trump’s and Robert Kiyosaki’s other books. As I mentioned, I never read them before so a lot of the information about their perspective on things were new to me, but I can see how readers of the previous books could be disappointed. That wheelbarrow example was something new to me though and I guess this Cashflow Quadrant thing has probably been a key tool in Kiyosaki’s books and teachings.
Having to think outside of the box and doings things differently from people who are not where they want to be financially is true of course which seems to be the key message to take out of it.