Rich Kid, Smart Kid
Look who's talking in BookPage!
Stephen Ambrose
Children's Authors
Stan and Jan Berenstain |
'Rich Dad' offers tips for parents
INTERVIEW BY STEPHANIE SWILLEY
Robert Kiyosaki's debut training manual for millionaire-wannabes, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, has spent more than six months on top of the bestseller lists. With it and his Rich Dad follow-ups, Rich Dad's Guide to Investing and Cashflow Quadrant, he introduced a new financial mindset, and now he's besieged by worried middle-agers asking, "Why didn't you write this 25 years ago?" Parents may think it's too late for them to strike it rich, but there's still time for their children. To help parents teach their kids his simple financial principles before they get stuck on the treadmill of work and debt, Kiyosaki teamed up with Sharon Lechter to write another in the Rich Dad series, Rich Dad's Rich Kid, Smart Kid: Giving Your Children a Financial Headstart. "Money is kind of a base subject. Like water, food, air and housing, it affects everything," says Kiyosaki. "Yet for some reason the world of academics thinks it's a subject below their social standing." In Rich Kid, Smart Kid, Kiyosaki looks at three factors of success every child needs: a winning academic formula, a winning financial formula and a winning professional formula. But his primary focus is on helping parents instill a sound financial education, a subject he says most schools ignore. "Academic qualifications are important," he says, "and so is financial education. They're both important and [schools] are forgetting one of them." Kiyosaki is adamant that every child is a genius in some way and that parents just have to figure out how their child likes to learn and what will motivate them. Once parents have found their child's unique learning style, Kiyosaki gives them simple exercises to introduce concepts like financial statements and assets and liabilities. Like his previous books, Rich Kid, Smart Kid is filled with personal anecdotes from Kiyosaki's youth. He struggled in school and says his father, a prominent educator for the state of Hawaii, was instrumental in keeping him in school. "My parents were very active in my education, otherwise I would have flunked out. I would have been a juvenile delinquent probably," he admits. But why should parents listen to a guy who readily confesses to being "not that smart"? Because "my banker has never once asked me for my report card," he says with a chuckle. "In the real world we need both academic skills and financial skills to survive." Kiyosaki's key business mantras, like "savers are losers" and "don't work for money; make it work for you," sometimes clash with conventional wisdom. But he says that's because "the values or points of view between the middle class and the rich are exactly opposite." In the best-selling Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Kiyosaki explained those different perspectives by contrasting his real dad or "poor dad," who worked hard but was constantly hounded by money troubles, with his "rich dad," the father of his best friend, who bought real estate and became one of the wealthiest men in Hawaii. What his "poor dad" told him was smart -- get a safe, secure job, buy a big house, save money and get out of debt -- his "rich dad" called risky. Instead "rich dad" told him to build a business, not get a job, and buy a big apartment building, not a big house. With over a million copies sold, Kiyosaki remembers the battle to get Rich Dad, Poor Dad published. Every bookseller and distributor turned him down, so he printed 1,000 copies himself. He begged a friend to put 12 books out in his car wash, and two weeks later the books were gone. It was a word-of-mouth hit that initially found its success through the network marketing industry. "Once the public got a hold of [Rich Dad, Poor Dad], it just never stopped," he says. With Rich Kid, Smart Kid Kiyosaki gets a chance to explore both of his passions -- money and education. "I wanted to validate the parent's most important role of teaching their children," Kiyosaki says. "It's not something you want to leave up to the school system. Ultimately, right or wrong, the parent is the child's most important teacher."
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