Book Review – Fake by Robert Kiyosaki

Robert Kiyosaki is best known for writing one of the highest selling financial books ever written, Rich Dad Poor Dad, I read Rich Dad Poor Dad many years ago and remember really getting a lot out of it. I had not read or watched anything from Kiyosaki in the years since, although I did play his board game CASHFLOW which I enjoyed.

It is hard to know where to begin with this book, I will start by saying it is not your typical personal finance book and a lot of the advice is different to what you would normally hear. I do not mind this as I am more than happy to have my own thoughts challenged as long as whoever is making the argument is able to back it up.

It is worth noting that from the outset, that this book appears to be suited to making significant amounts of money, I am talking tens of millions of dollars amounts of wealth. To make these sums of money, then the typical lifestyle of working as an employee and regular saving/investing will not get you there (unless you are able to achieve a ridiculously high paying job). If you were looking at making these amounts of money, then you would need to adopt different strategies, which this book somewhat goes into, so I appreciate and understand that there is a difference in how to achieve the end goal in that sense. For me personally, since I am not looking at reaching that sort of level of wealth, it was not the most relevant in that aspect. That being said, I still found it interesting and eye opening to see a bit more about the world around us.

The main premise of the book is how society is currently a two-way system, where it is the rich verse everybody else. The gap between the rich and everybody else is growing significantly over time and they effectively built the system to maintain (and increase) their wealth, while exploiting everybody else for their own financial gain. When I said “rich”, I am talking about people who are billionaires (or close to it), the uber wealthy who effectively live in a different world to the rest of us.

I will state now that the book is written with a US perspective, so while it is not completely relevant to Australia, there is still a lot of aspects which are relatable to Australia. There is a heavy criticism of the education system, and while it is focused on the US education system, I can still see a lot of parallels with the Australian education system, and I must say I do agree with a lot of the issues. It is not so much an issue with high school, but more tertiary education, where you are encouraged to take out significant student debt (obviously it is not as bad in Australia), and then taught ways to fit into the system which in the end mostly benefits the rich. It makes sense since a lot of the time these educational institutions were started by the rich at the time who wanted to teach smart people to indirectly work for them.

There is also a big focus on “Fake” money, which is basically all fiat currency, and how it is only paper at the end of the day and there is nothing stopping the Federal Reserve (Reserve Bank equivalent) printing more and more notes, essentially devaluing currency by inflation. This premise makes sense and when Kiyosaki says “Saving money will make you rich” is a Lie, I can definitely see where he is coming from, but I still think it is a bit extreme. Again, the main thing is to see what he defines as being “rich” – to me, if you were able to save around 30% of your income, and invest it in index funds, then after 15 years or so then I would consider that person rich. But in the context of this book, you would be several magnitudes of wealth below what Kiyosaki considers rich.

Overall, there was a lot of interesting aspects to read in this book, and you will not read about these points of view in a lot of personal finance books. I can see why Kiyosaki has become so controversial because he goes against the grain of what a lot of the other “experts” are saying, but I do not believe he is necessarily wrong, and a lot of the time the criticism is because these other “experts” do not like Kiyosaki revealing what is really happening in the financial world.

I can also see criticism of Kiyosaki because there are definitely a few negative aspects of the book I found which I will summarise here:

• Repetition – this is probably the main one, the same graphs, sentences, even paragraphs were used over and over throughout the book. A lot of the time the same point was made but just worded differently. I understand he really wanted to drive the point home, but it just feels like the 450-page book could have been about 250 pages without all the repetition.
• Gods Money – if you read the book, you will hear Kiyosaki talk about God’s money, gold and silver. I have nothing against gold and silver, but the religious tones to call it “God’s money” over and over (again it is repeated a lot) really made me roll my eyes at the end of it. There are also a lot of other religious sections, which personally turned me off. Not that I am against religion in any way, it just is not for me.
• Clickbaity – I am not sure how to explain this next issue, but I just get the feeling that a lot of the book is written in an exaggerated way to make it seem a lot more dramatic than it might need to be. Even the title, “Fake” is quite overly dramatic and clickbaity in my opinion, but then a lot of the book is like that too.
• Salesman – This might be related to the previous point, but I also got the impression that Kiyosaki is just trying to sell you something throughout the book. There is a lot of references to his own products (previous books, his podcast, his board game) and while I understand he is a businessman just trying to make money, it is a bit of a turn off for me to continuously see the cross promotion.

In summary, I enjoyed how the book did challenge my thinking and did provide a new perspective which I was not too familiar with in the past. I do not believe it really builds on the information provided in Rich Dad Poor Dad. But since Fake was written in 2019, it is a fair bit more current than Rich Dad Poor Dad which was written in 1997. A lot of the lessons are still similar, however.