Rich Dad Poor Dad

Argues that a good education and a secure job are not guarantees for financial success, and describes guidelines for making money work for you.

Rich Dad Poor Dad is a book by Robert Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter. It advocates financial independence through investing, real estate, owning businesses, and the use of finance protection tactics.
Rich Dad Poor Dad is written in the style of a set of parables, ostensibly based on Kiyosaki's life.[1] Kiyosaki stresses the ownership of high value assets, rather than being an employee as a recurring theme in the book's chapters.

Summary
The book is largely based on Kiyosaki's upbringing and education in Hawaii. The book highlights the different attitudes to money, work and life of two men, and how they in turn influenced key decisions in Kiyosaki's life.
Among some of the book's topics are:
* the value of financial intelligence
* that corporations spend first, then pay taxes, while individuals must pay taxes first
* that corporations are artificial entities that anyone can use, but the poor usually don't know how
According to Kiyosaki and Lechter, wealth is measured as the number of days the income from your assets will sustain you, and financial independence is achieved when your monthly income from assets exceeds your monthly expenses. Each dad had a different way of teaching his son.

Criticism
John T. Reed, an outspoken critic of Robert Kiyosaki, says, "Rich Dad, Poor Dad contains much wrong advice, much bad advice, some dangerous advice, and virtually no good advice." He also states, "Rich Dad, Poor Dad is one of the dumbest financial advice books I have ever read. It contains many factual errors and numerous extremely unlikely accounts of events that supposedly occurred."[2] Kiyosaki has provided a rebuttal to some of Reed's statements.[3] Slate reviewer Rob Walker called the book full of nonsense, and said that Kiyosaki's claims were often vague, the narrative "fablelike", and that much of the book was "self help boilerplate", noting the predictable common features of such books were present in Rich Dad, Poor Dad. He also criticizes Kiyosaki's conclusions about Americans, American culture, and Kiyosaki's methods. [4]
In the February 2003 issue of SmartMoney magazine, Kiyosaki backed off his claim that his "rich dad" was a real person, instead saying, "Is Harry Potter real? Why donÆt you let Rich Dad be a myth, like Harry Potter?"
In 2007, Lechter sued Kiyosaki, alleging numerous instances of financial misconduct. The suit was settled for an undisclosed sum over a year later.