The primary secret is not confusing assets and liabilities, and acting upon that lack of confusion... What's scary is taking risks rather than sticking to "what's safe and secure"...
You can find Kiyosaki's site at: http://www.richdad.com He is one of my favorite non-trading authors...
Ya, I read the book. Completely changed my view on money and possessions. However, I think the author exaggerated how easy it is to start and run a successful business. His constant references to his own products, such as his board games etc., made me suspicious of his motives.
Candle, could you please add some pictures of the call girls you mention to your site so we can make ourselfes an image ??
candle: thanks for the great link to rdpd. i've got a preschooler and it looks fantastico! triple j: issues? are you talking financial? social? you got me curious...
Part of the "secret", that RDPD is trying to convey is to set up a business SYSTEM that can operate without you, thereby generating you income while you have a bitch suck on your dick. This is one of the reasons why he's so big on real estate. Pick up income property, hire a management firm, and you've got a tax breaks and income coming in. You don't have to bust your back working for someone else and getting reamed on taxes. Very big on starting your own business (particularly real estate). Anyways, trading requires our constant care and attention. You can't just walk away and continue to make money. OK, well, actually you can if you set up a program or swing trade. But you get the idea. Royalties, real estate, interest income, business income, etc. etc. etc. My plan does involve eventually acquiring real estate investments in addition to income generated from trading. 10 years from now, I want to trade, not for survival, but simply for enjoyment and the adrenaline rush. I want to be able to take a week long vacation on a whim and come back with my bank account a little fuller than I left it. P.S. Another good series of book is the Millionaire Next Door and the Millionaire Mind. P.S.S. I like Mr. K and his books, but he does like to bash equities and so forth.
I fully agree with you about the fact that Kiyosaki tends to stress the concept of residual income i.e. income which occurs automatically and periodically once your investment is in place... I suppose the closest trading analogy would be as follows... as your account grows (say from 1 contract to 20 contracts), the amount of effort you need to expend to make a decent amount of money reduces exponentially... When I occasionally spin 20 contracts and take 3 points out of a single trade, netting 60, I ponder upon how much effort I expended making that 60 relative to how much effort a 1 lot trader would need to expend making the same 60 points... of course, one still needs to expend effort (albeit much less as a result of the larger size), so we can only approximate Kiyosaki's notion of residual, recurring income, a concept which fits more comfortably within the confines of real estate investments... P.S. I will readily concede that Kiyosaki does not look favorably upon daytrading... he mentions it in a derogatory way in his book "The Business School"... however, we must temper this derogation by recognising that Kiyosaki stressed the merits of penny stock trading in another of his books! These facts notwithstanding, there are still plenty of conceptual issues that I agree with Kiyosaki on...
I "retired" at 48 and started trading. The retirement came about as I was "downsized". Fortunately, I had a bronze parachute-about 2 years salary to tide me over. I looked around at the jobs available and there were a lot but I did not want to start over at the bottom, only 2 weeks vacation, etc. Since I have had an interest in stock trading going back to my teenage years, I naturally gravitated to it. Bought SystemWriter Plus (Tradestation's predecessor) and started looking for winning systems. By accident, actually I was teaching myself how to code in EasyLanguage, I found a simple system that seemed to work. After ridding myself of disbelief, I placed a few trades, disregarding money management principals that I did not at the time even existed. The first trade made about what I had been making in a month. The others did pretty good too. I think I had a string of 7 or 8 big winners in a row. At this point, I started reading a lot about trading and realized that I wasn't smart, but lucky. (Luck is good.) I then started to trade smaller amounts and placed some of my winnings, the money from my separation package as well as other funds I had received from excercising company options into bonds and utility stocks. IE-I wanted income I could fall back on when the trading went south, which it of course did. I have been trading now for over 8 years. I continue to put trading profits into bonds, utility stocks, royalty trusts, and REITs that generate nearly enough income for me to live on and my trading buys me extras-really liked my trip to Tibet and the African safari that I took recently. My point is: I was well capitalized, was lucky at first, realized that my early success was luck and educated myself in other aspects of trading such as risk control, money management. I also realized that most if not all systems stop working at some time and you need a back up plan. Mine was to invest in income producing investments and keep looking for other systems. One final point: I work harder now than I ever did, so my retirement is yet to come; but I like what I'm doing, don't have to commute, and the hours, income and flexibility are better. Doug S