1
0:00:00
I want to be rich, you want to be rich, but how the heck do we do it? We all know they don't teach this stuff in schools. Well, luckily today, Robert Kiyosaki is coming to the rescue and apparently he had a rich dad. So he's going to teach us all the secrets about how to become wealthy. So stay tuned.
2
0:00:17
Music
1
0:00:28
Welcome to the Mastering Real Estate podcast. This podcast is for real estate investors and professionals looking to take their real estate game to the next level. On Tuesdays, I analyze the industry's leading real estate books and break down the main lessons that you can apply to your life in business. Then on Thursdays, I review the lessons I have learned from flipping over 100 houses so we can all become masters of real estate together.
2
0:00:58
Here's a little bit about me. I'm Maura McGraw. I've been a full-time real estate
1
0:01:02
investor since 2018. I founded and grew a real estate investment company from zero to over two million dollars in revenue annually and $5 million plus in assets. At this point, I've managed over 75 flips and I also co-founded and helped run a property management company and grew that to over 600 assets under management. I've since exited out of the property management business but learned a ton along the way. And I'm just gonna provide my two cents as someone who's living and working in the industry day in and day out and try to assess how we can all take these lessons in the books and apply them to our real estate careers. So, not surprisingly, we are going to start the podcast by reviewing Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad, Poor Dad. And this is one of the most recommended books by real estate investors. It's sold over 40 million copies in over a hundred companies worldwide. And Robert says that the main reason he wrote the book was to help share his insights about how people could use financial intelligence to solve life's common problems. And I think he has some really good insights about that that we'll look at here in a second. So Robert Kiyosaki is an American businessman and author. He's the founder of the Rich Global LLC and the Rich Dad Company, which is a private financial education company that provides personal finance and business education through books and videos. He was born in Hawaii in 1947 and graduated from high school in 1965, but he did not attend college. He started several businesses, grew a large real estate portfolio, authored over 26 books, and has a net worth of over $100 million. However, in 2012, Kiyosaki's company filed for bankruptcy and was fined nearly $24 million that they had to pay to the learning addicts. Additionally, two documentaries have been made exposing some of the shady techniques used in his seminars. So he is definitely a controversial figure. Some people love him and some people think he's a total crook. I'll leave it up to you to make your own judgment after you've heard what I've had to say and maybe after you've read some of his books yourself. Here's a quick summary of the book. It's called Rich Dad Poor Dad because young Robert Kiyosaki grew up with two father figures who taught him opposite lessons about money. His biological father or his poor dad was a PhD professor and government worker for most of his career and he told Robert to go to school, study, and get a job, ideally one with a pension and benefits. Conversely, Robert had a best friend named Mike and his dad, Mike's dad, or his rich dad, was a successful businessman and mentor to Robert who taught him many unconventional lessons about how to make money and create long-term wealth. And that's really what the whole book is about. It boils down all the lessons that Robert's rich dad or Mike's dad taught him and helps people apply those lessons to their life and investing career. The main concepts in this book can be boiled down into nine main lessons. Lesson number one, rich people don't work for money, they make money work for them. So rich people don't usually work for a salary, they make their money work for them through investments and businesses. Lesson number two, educate yourself about finances, identify real assets, and invest in them. Instead of needing a salary, rich people's assets bring in enough money to provide for them and often leave them with enough money left over to reinvest again in things like stocks, bonds, and real estate. Lesson number three, mind your own business. Make money for yourself, not your employer. Tend to your own finances and learn to distinguish between your profession, which is what you do 40 hours a week, and your business, which is how you're growing your assets. Because only growing your assets is actually going to make you rich and bring you long-term wealth. Lesson number four, by understanding the tax code and the legal system, the rich stay one step ahead of the system. And one of the main tools that the rich use to shelter themselves from taxes are corporations or business structures. A corporation is allowed to spend pre-tax dollars and is only taxed on what remains after expenses. By shielding their assets using corporations, the rich avoid paying tax like the middle class and poor do. Additionally, corporations limit the amount of money that they can lose if an enterprise goes under by structuring themselves as a corporation. Lesson number five is most of us aren't given a financial education. So it's very important that you take the initiative to educate yourself and get a financial strategy. Lesson number six is get yourself a financial education and follow these three steps. First assess your current situation, second set financial goals, and three build the financial intelligence to reach your goals. So basically you need to take an honest look at your current financial state, set realistic financial goals, and then build your knowledge base so that you can realistically attain your goals. Lesson number seven, financial intelligence and courage allows the rich to invent money in any situation. Here Kiyosaki is saying that being brave and bold enough to take risks is something that all rich people have in common. This is important because without a little guts or without the bravery to take a little risk, opportunities are simply going to pass you by. Lesson number eight, instead of playing it safe, try investing your money in stocks, bonds, or real estate. Taking those bigger chances and handling the risks that they present is necessary in order to make a bigger income. Otherwise, you're never going to win. Lesson number nine, don't just work to earn. Working to learn is much more important. And here, Kiyosaki is emphasizing the importance of gaining a broad range of skill sets and knowledge because this is ultimately what's going to help you succeed in business. Contrary to some popular beliefs that specialization is what makes rich people and business people successful, especially when it comes to management skills. Basically the whole book can be boiled down to this one quote, if you want to be rich simply spend your life buying or building assets. If you want to be poor or middle-class spend your life buying liabilities. And here Robert has some really nice diagrams that show the income statements of the poor, middle, and wealthy. And he illustrates how wealthy people, by accruing assets, their assets generate income for them. And this is what ultimately leads people to becoming rich. So what I really like about this book is that it motivated me and ultimately helped me change my mindset about making money and generating long-term wealth. Some of you may know that before I got into real estate, I was in the military for 10 years. And in the early part of my career, I would have said that I don't really, I didn't really care about money that much. I found a lot of fulfillment in my job in the military, and I made enough money to survive and live comfortably. And that's all I really cared about. But my mindset totally began to shift when my husband and I, when we decided to have a family and I had to start really thinking more long-term and what I wanted my life to look like and planning for the future for our children. I realized that long-term wealth is important and that I didn't want to spend all my time working for someone else, so I needed to figure out a way to do that. And the simple lessons in this book ultimately inspired me to become a real estate investor and I know that tons of other real estate investors have been similarly inspired by this book. So that is a really positive attribute of this book in my opinion. One kind of frustration that I have with the book is that I think that in general you come away from the book feeling generally inspired to make some positive changes in your life and build long-term wealth, but it's hard to know exactly which step to take next. You get kind of a broad range of good advice throughout the book, but it's hard to identify the next immediate action steps to take after finishing the book. I think you can walk away wanting to make some changes, but then it can be easily overwhelming about what the right path is to take. You're kind of left feeling inspired but not knowing exactly what to do with your newfound motivation. I think there are a lot of really great and simple lessons in this book, but I really have boiled it down to four key takeaways that I think all of us as real estate professionals, investors, or aspiring investors that we can take away and apply to our lives and business. And the first one is to educate yourself and start investing. So this can be as simple as taking a course or reading a book to improve your financial literacy and then choosing an asset class to learn more about and start investing in. It doesn't necessarily have to be real estate. It could be stocks or bonds or something else, but I think a really good step would be to, based on whatever your goals are, to read a book or take a course about a certain asset class and then commit to start investing in it. I think that's something that any of us could do, a really good action step based off this book. The next key takeaway is keep your day job. Robert, you know, he doesn't just say, oh everyone should automatically quit their jobs. I think he gives some good advice that you can start with a side hustle to generate extra income and you can use that income to start investing. And I think this is generally good advice. This is not what I did. Personally I went all in into investing but I think this is probably a safer approach especially if you have other people who depend on you. You can start investing on the side and the more you learn the more you grow your investments, then you can make bigger changes of leaving your job. So keep your job, but start an investing side hustle. The next key lesson is to know the tax system. And this can be really overwhelming. I know, especially when I started out in real estate, I didn't know a lot about taxes. I knew that generally real estate was a very tax-advantaged asset class, but I didn't know exactly what to do. So I know a lot of people may be in this boat, and I think a good step would be just to find a really good CPA who can help offset some of your tax burden. I think that if you're a serious investor, it's 100% worth investing in a good CPA who can be a little bit of a mentor and advisor to you and help offset your tax burden and advise you on tax strategies to take home more of your money. And the final lesson is to learn more skills. So I think you know Robert always talks about to try to learn as many skills, especially management skills, as possible. So an easy thing that we can all do is identify a skill that we are weaker in that you would want to improve and simply take a course or read a book and commit to improving that skill or that weakness or find a mentor who can help you. So what would be a good example of this? I guess for me since I am this is you know my first podcast episode I've been wanting to do this podcast for a long time but I'm still very new at it so I think finding a mentor or just diving a little deeper into some education to improve my skills is probably perfect timing to improve this particular skill. And there's there's about a million different skills that you can learn that will help you with your investing and wealth creation. So I think that's something that can apply to everybody. So who should read this book? Really I think there's two groups of people that would benefit the most from reading this book and that's young professionals and newer investors. So if you're at the beginning of your real estate investing journey I think that this can be very valuable to you. It contains a lot of the basic concepts that are important to understand and provides you with motivation and encouragement to move forward which is really valuable especially at the beginning of your career. I think it's also valuable for young professionals because if you can learn some of these long-term wealth creation strategies early on, you are really going to set yourself up for success in the future. On the other hand, if you're already a very seasoned investor, you may not have very much to learn from this book. You've probably already mastered a lot of the basics and unless you just need kind of if you're in a slump and you need some extra motivation maybe. But again if you've been investing for a long time you might not get a whole lot out of reading this book. So every week I'm planning to rate all the books that I read and overall I would rate Rich Dad Poor Dad as a seven and the reason is it's a quick and easy read and it's inspired a lot of people to dive deeper into financial literacy and begin investing. So overall positive, however it is a little vague on the and begin investing. So overall positive, however it is a little vague on the details.
Transcribed with Cockatoo
