‘Rich’ vs ‘Poor’ mindset

We continue delivering you great articles about successful financial mindset. This time the brilliant ideas are shared by Robert Kiyosaki. Enjoy.

The most obsolete idea is - go to school, get a job, work hard, save money, get out of debt and invest for the long-term in the stock market.

Why would you save money when they're printing trillions of dollars? The gap between the 1% and 99% is massive. It's not just money, you have to step back and look at the bigger picture.

So, what do you do?
In every one of us there's a poor person, there's still a poor person inside me. There's also a middle-class person, and the middle-class person wants security they want that steady paycheck. And there's a rich person. And they're all inside of us except that... It's not taught.

You're taught to go to school, get a job and get a paycheck. Not taught how to get rich. If you've read Rich Dad Poor Dad, my rich dad refused to pay me. He said the paycheck was one of the most damaging things you can take in your life. He says the moment you take a paycheck you're an employee and that's the mindset. So, my rich dad never paid me. It drove my poor dad, you know, a government employee nuts. "You got to pay people, you got to pay people", he used to yell. And rich dad was not saying that the paycheck was bad, he says he didn't want to be a slave to money.

So, as an entrepreneur, you know, if rich dad folded – ‘I just try another company. I don't need a paycheck. I don't need anybody to take care of me. If my government doesn't like me. I move to another country, because they need entrepreneurs there.’

The entrepreneur is not so much the business, the entrepreneur is really the mindset and the skill sets and the different set of rules. You see, I don't operate small business. As it does not operate in the same rules as big business.

Entrepreneur is a mindset first, a skill set and rules. And depending upon whether you're an employee or small business the rules are different, the mindsets are different, the skill sets are different.

If I could say one thing to somebody whose never been an entrepreneur and they're thinking about making the leap of faith into becoming an entrepreneur, well, I'll just tell them the same thing that happened to me. You know, my last paycheck, I still remember it clearly, it was one of the worst and the best days of my life and I was in Puerto Rico, I was working for Xerox and my boss gave me my last… it wasn't a paycheck, it was a bonus check. I think it was about 30,000 bucks… taxable, that's the only problem with that. So, I get this check and I went, "Holy mackerel." You know, I mean, so I was excited, but I was also disturbed. And so this other guy comes up to me, his name was John, and John says to me says to me "you're going to be back." I asked "Why?", and he says, "because you're going to fail." I looked at him and I said, "look... few expletive words… because that's what he did, he left Xerox, failed and he came back. I said, look... you fail and you came back but I'm going to fail and I'm never coming back… and that's the attitude.

If you say, well, if I fail, I'll go back to mommy and daddy, then that's what you'll do. So, if you fail, that's when I became an entrepreneur because I had no money. I had no money for years. Yeah, I didn't have a paycheck. But that's what my rich dad encouraged me to do. He says, when you don't have this paycheck you get hungrier, smarter and it's a test of your character.

Will you become a crook?
Will you become dishonest?
Will you cheat and steal?
… Or will you become a better human being?

So really that's the benefit of becoming an entrepreneur, you really find out who you are when you don't have anything. So, you always have to look at the big picture. Too many people look at, well, what's, what's going to happen to me? When you look at the big picture, you're also going to know that when something bad happens something good is going to happen too. But you got to prepare for whatever is coming. If you think the next 20 years will be like the last 20 years, you're going to get creamed.

You know, when you and I go to the supermarket and we buy a carton of milk we always check for the expiration date. But most people do not check for the expiration date on their brains. Instead of getting out of debt I get into debt. I just refinanced 300 million in debt I went from 5% to 2.5% interest - I made a fortune.

Every month more money comes in because my cost of money has gone down. So, while some financial experts are saying get out of debt, I'm saying learn how to use debt. See when I came back from serving in Vietnam in January of 73 and the first thing my rich dad said to me was, Go to school to learn how to invest in real estate.

It wasn't real estate; it was how to use debt and taxes debt and taxes make the rich richer. Debt and taxes make the poor and middle class poorer. So, all the rich guys who are doctors and lawyers or... you know, those guys, they're getting creamed - and they don't know why. Doctors for examples - they're making more money but the take-home is less.

You know, my doctor just yelled at me, he's happy, he says - Oh, guess what I finally made a million dollars. And I said - well how much you pay in tax? He says, $750,000 in taxes. So, his net was about $400,000. That's not bad, but when I make a million bucks, I keep a million bucks. And the reason is because I don't make it by working for money.

If you work for money your taxed. So that's why lesson number one in ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’ is the rich don't work for money. What we do instead is we create businesses as entrepreneurs. We acquire real estate. I don't invest in the stock market, and the reason is because as entrepreneur I have more control over my income, how much I make and how much I pay in taxes. And because I'm an entrepreneur as well as an investor in real estate. I pay zero tax.

Every time I make let's say a million dollars as an entrepreneur, I immediately invest it in real estate, and I have a 4 to 1 step up. So, I put a million dollars in real estate, I get four million from the bank. That's why I love banks. But the banks are screwing everybody else you know, terrible but it's good for me.

When money is printed it's good for me, and when money is printed it's bad for people that work for money. This is because, when they print, savers get creamed and people who work for money get creamed. When they print debtors get rich. You see, debt and taxes make the rich richer and debt and taxes make the poor and middle class poorer.

When we have obsolete ideas, we get obsolete results. So, what's happening for most people the idea of going to school, getting a job, working hard, saving money, getting out of debt, buying your house because you believe it's an asset and investing for a long term. It's obsolete.

The world has changed, the world changed in 1971 when President Nixon took us off the gold standard and money became debt. On top of that, the education was more important years ago. Nowadays, it's just obsolete.

You know, there's Moore's law… Moore's law states information doubles every 18 months. In other words, everything is obsolete after 18 months. And this is a recent phenomenon. When you come out of school, you're already obsolete, and that's why I'm the old guy. I meet my friends; I went to Harvard… like what - 50 years ago?"

Today the banks are charging you interest to keep your money. In other words, the banks don't want your money because they've printed too much of it. And that's why there's bubbles and stocks and bubbles in real estate and all this. People are dumping the cash, because as I said in here, ‘Savers are losers and cash is trash’.

And yet people are like: ‘Well, I want a high-paying job.’ Well, that's an obsolete idea. Get out of debt, it's an obsolete idea. You should learn how to get into debt. How to you use debt to get rich. And they'll never teach you about taxes. The reason the 1% is way up there and the 99% are going down is because when they print money - two things happen - inflation and taxes.

And any entrepreneur that thinks ‘I'm just going to make money and start a business and make a lot of money’ they really should smell the roses instead. You know, that's not what the real entrepreneurs are doing. Do you know, there's 28 million small business owners in America and 24 million are one person entrepreneurs? They're called non-employee entrepreneurs. That's what happens when people don't really understand what an entrepreneur does and how money works nowadays.  Most people are self-employed, but they're not really entrepreneurs. The self-employed pay the highest taxes of all and nobody tells them that!

It's also called the entrepreneurial spirit but what we're talking about was there's no such thing as a bad economy. We all have an external economy, but we also have an internal economy, and the will power is to change our internal economy.

I can see the good, and I can see the bad. I don't really give a damn. Because I'm going to be rich anyway.

But a poor person with a poor personal economy. All they're going to see is a bad economy. Because they don't know how to make money in any economy. And a middle-class person, they have a middle-class economy. You know what they want is a nice house, a steady paycheck and the job and the car. And when you take their job away to them that's disaster. And since an entrepreneur doesn't have a job anyway, it's no big deal.

All I'm saying to people is what Bucky Fuller taught me. There’re always two sides, and if you think the economy is bad, it's because your economy is bad. If you think that steady employment is important - then you'll see an economy without jobs. It’s always about your economy versus the external economy. Where you control vs where you can't control. And you can control it - it's called an internal focus vs an external focus.

The real entrepreneur has an internal focus but if they fall, they say, ‘Oh, this is good because I'm going to go up higher.’ You know, the average person will fall and say ‘Oh, I'm going to take some Prozac’. Or, they just claim that mistakes don't matter. Mistakes matter, it means you didn't know something.

A real entrepreneur whether they fall, or they just go, they always can go up. They can stand back up and go higher. That no matter what happens to them they got stronger and better, and smarter and happier.

On the contrast - a person with a weak internal mindset is that they're so afraid of what happens, and it generally happens. Like, people who are afraid of losing their jobs they generally lose their jobs.

The entrepreneur first job is control inside here, not outside there. The moment you take that paycheck you're an employee. You've got to be stronger than that. It's about inside control.