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Raising Your Financial IQ
There are many definitions of intelligence. One of the more practical ones I learned from my rich dad is, “Intelligence is the ability to solve problems.” For example, in school, if you can solve math problems, you are considered intelligent. Out of school, if you can fix a car, you are deemed to have automotive intelligence. When it comes to money, the bigger financial problems you can solve, the higher your financial intelligence.
Today, our world faces some serious financial problems. Many are interrelated problems, one causing the other. Some of the more pressing ones are:
1. Value of the dollar falling
2. National debt increasing
3. Baby boomers starting to retire
4. Oil prices rising
5. Gap increasing between the rich and everyone else
6. Wages decreasing
7. Jobs being exported
8. Social Security and Medicare going bankrupt
9. Savings being wiped out
10. Lack of financial education being taught
The pressing questions are:
1. What can we do?
2. What are the solutions to these problems?
3. Is our financial IQ high enough to solve these problems?
4. How do we avoid becoming victims of these problems?
5. How do we protect our families from falling victim to these problems?
Many of today’s financial problems exist because we did not solve the problems when they first arose. Rather than increasing the financial IQ of the population, we taught people to expect the government to solve their personal problems for them. This is why no politician dares touch Social Security and Medicare…even though most of us know these programs are doomed.
Now I can hear some of you readers saying, “We need to take care of those who cannot care for themselves.” And I agree with that. We, as a civilized society, should take care of those who cannot take care of themselves. However, most of us can take care of ourselves if we have to and if we have been trained to.
It’s time to raise our financial IQ.
Changing Demographic
Because of the low financial IQ solutions we used in the past, today our demographic population is changing from
What the diagram shows is that the rich are getting richer, and everyone else is getting poorer, even though many people are making more money. Unfortunately, the United States is not the only country heading in this direction. Many world economies are becoming two-class societies: the rich and the poor…classes or masses.
The April 16, 2006, Sunday edition of The New York Times ran a frontpage article with the headline:
“Revival in Japan Brings Widening of Economic Gap”
The second paragraph of the article states:
“Today, in a country whose view of itself was once captured in the slogan, ‘100 million, all-middle class society,’ catchphrases harshly sort people into ‘winners’ and ‘losers,’ and describe Japan as a ‘society of widening disparities.’”
In other words, the middle class is being wiped out. Today in Japan, you are either rich or poor, a financial winner or a financial loser. The same thing is happening in America and in many European countries.
The Price of a Low Financial IQ
In my conversations with Donald Trump, we agreed that we cannot solve today’s complex financial challenges with yesterday’s financial intelligence. If we as a nation attempt to solve Social Security and Medicare by giving people more entitlement payouts, the golden goose will be cooked and eaten, and there will be no more golden eggs.
The reason why we write, speak and create educational games and other products is because we want people to become rich and solve their own financial problems rather than expect others to solve their problems for them. We both agreed that by giving people money, we only made the problem bigger, harder to solve and more dangerous.
Simply said, America is on its way to becoming a well-educated nation of rich people and poor people. The middle class is becoming extinct. The problem is our nation is filled with people like my poor dad—a good man, well-educated, hard-working, yet expecting the government to take care of him when he retired.
There are many definitions for intelligence. One of the more practical ones I learned from my rich dad is, “Intelligence is the ability to solve problems.”
– Robert T. Kiyosaki
We’ve mentioned that in a few years, the first of approximately 75 million baby boomers will begin to retire. This is the first generation that has contributed fully to Social Security and Medicare. The problem is, the money they contributed is gone, disappeared into a Ponzi scheme.
There are two more problems: Since we do not teach much about money in schools, many of those 75 million do not know what a Ponzi scheme it is. Secondly, since most did contribute fully, they deserve to be paid. But if each (of the 75 million baby boomers) begins to collect just $1,000 a month in Social Security and Medicare benefits, the total added to the U.S. government’s payroll is $75 billion a month. This is similar to the cost of one Hurricane Katrina or one Iraq War—every month. The good news is you still have time to prepare and avoid becoming a victim of the coming financial hurricanes…but not much time.
In Sunday School, I was taught:
Give a person a fish and you feed him for a day. And that is what we as a nation have been doing. This is the entitlement mentality of Social Security and Medicare.
Teach a person to fish and you feed him for life. This is what Donald and I have been doing. We want people to learn to be rich and teach others to be rich.
In Teach To Be Rich, a product I created to assist our CASHFLOW Clubs in teaching others to be rich, I talk about how some people do not want to give people fish or teach others to fish…instead they sell people fish. Many of these people are stockbrokers, real estate brokers, financial planners, bankers and insurance agents. They are in the business of selling…not necessarily teaching or giving. When you put the two words, sell and fish, together, you get the word selfish. And even though most people in the business may not be selfish, enough are to make the word ring true. I use it here to emphasize the importance of staying on your guard to be aware of the differences between those who give—the teachers—and those who sell.
Donald and I are concerned that most people do not choose to learn to manage their own money or learn to invest their own money. Instead of learn, they simply turn their money over to experts and then hope and pray their experts are truly experts.
In Donald’s book, How To Get Rich, he has this to say about financial advisors…people who sell fish. The chapter heading says it all:
Be Your Own Financial Advisor
The chapter begins with:
“Many people go out and hire financial advisors, but I have also seen a lot of these advisors destroy people.
“Athletes, in particular, make a great deal of money at a very young age. Too often, some manager squanders the athlete’s fortune and they wind up in their thirties with nothing left but their past glory—and are forced to get jobs just to survive.”
We Want to Teach You to Fish
Donald Trump and I do not sell fish. We do not sell investment advice or tell people what to invest in. We are teachers. We want you to learn how to become rich, invest your own money and become your own financial expert. We want to teach you to fish for yourself.
Rich Dad’s Secret
As I mentioned before, many rich people are secretive. I didn’t realize how much so until my rich dad’s family asked me to keep their name out of Rich Dad Poor Dad. Many rich people would rather be anonymous. They either do not want to be known and/or they do not want to share their financial secrets. That is why I was pleasantly surprised to find Donald Trump to be so open about his wealth and willing to share his keys to financial success.
In her book Buffettology, Mary Buffett writes:
“F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the very rich are different from you and me. He was right. But they are different in the strangest of ways, the oddest being the code of silence that they demand of family and friends. While married to Peter (Warren Buffett’s son), I was instructed more than once not to speak to anyone outside the family about Warren and his investment operations. Writing this book simply would have been out of the question.”
After her divorce from Peter, Mary Buffett broke the code of silence and went on to explain in detail how Warren Buffett does it, spilling Buffett’s secrets. It is a great book and well-written. And it does explain Warren Buffett’s secrets. It’s Warren Buffett’s how-to book, even though he did not authorize it. However, it is how Warren Buffett does it. It does not mean you or I or even Donald Trump can do it the same way. Nor we would necessarily want to.
You need to find the style and method that is best suited for you. While it is important to learn from people like Warren and Donald, it is also important to find your own secret formula.
Dreams vs. Goals
Many people have dreams. Rich people have goals. So the question is, what is the difference between dreams and goals?
Several years ago, I attended a church service at the New Birth Church in Atlanta, Georgia. Giving the sermon that day was not Bishop Eddie Long. Instead, the sermon was delivered by Archbishop Vernon Ashe. The sermon had a powerful lesson on the power of process and goals.
Archbishop Ashe said, “Every goal has a process.” As he spoke I began to realize why so many people who have dreams fail to have their dreams come true. The reason is most people have dreams but do not focus on the process necessary to achieve their dreams. For example, many people want to lose weight. But what gets in their way of achieving their goal is the process of change in diet and exercise. So instead of achieving their goal, their dream of a healthier, more attractive body remains a dream.
The other day, I drove up to my gym in my Bentley convertible. A young woman walked out and said, “That’s the car of my dreams.”
Thanking her for the compliment, I asked, “How do you plan on making your dream come true?”
Her reply was, “I don’t know. I guess I’ll just keep dreaming.”
And this is what Archbishop Ashe was talking about. His point was the process is as important as the goal…so any goal without a process is just a dream.
Many people, especially people with money problems, think that more money will solve their money problems. Instead of setting a goal, finding their own process—their own secret formula—and becoming a rich person…they buy lottery tickets, hope for a raise, get into debt keeping up with the Jones who are also deeply in debt trying to look rich, all the while dreaming of someday becoming a rich person. The Archbishop’s lesson was that the difference between dreams and goals was the process…and in many ways, the process is more important than the dream or the goal.
What if You Lost It All?
Years ago, when a reporter asked Henry Ford what he would do if he lost his billion dollar fortune, he replied, “I’d have it back in less than five years.” One of important aspects of finding your own formula, your own process, is that when you reach your goal, it will be the process of gaining knowledge that will make you rich. As my rich dad often said, “Money does not make you rich. Knowledge makes you rich.” And knowledge is derived from a process.
As you know, Donald and I have had our own financial challenges. We know those challenges have made us smarter and richer. Financial challenges, the wins and the losses are all part of the process of becoming rich. For Donald and me, our process or learning was via entrepreneurship and real estate. Warren Buffett’s process was by buying companies. Mohammad Ali’s was via boxing. So this book is not about you getting rich quick. This book is about you finding your own process to become rich. It is about the process that makes your dreams come true.
Donald’s View
The Shrinking Middle Class
When Robert and I were talking about the shrinking middle class, it made me aware that some things can be explained. It’s like an hourglass with the middle class the pinched part, or like someone with a very small waistline.
What happens when you flip the hourglass? Either way you flip it, you have the poor feeding the rich or the rich feeding the poor. It’s either one or the other. I don’t like that visual because it reminds me of the Old World and aristocratic ways that America revolted against. Are we headed back that way? Were the colonists just a bunch of misguided idealists to begin with?
I’ve been reading some newspapers while enjoying some travel time, but there were some stories in The Wall Street Journal that got me to thinking about risk. Just yesterday we heard about three climbers dying on their way down from Mt. Everest, evidently from exhaustion, after they had reached their goal. Today we have an article about the great racehorse, Barbaro, and his terrible injury, and we have the tragedy in the Volvo Ocean Race, where a young Dutchman was washed overboard from a yacht. Then, the crew of another yacht had to abandon ship in an incredible storm, and they were rescued by the yacht that had lost one of its crew. These are all experienced yachtsmen, and their seamanship was not in question. And with Barbaro, tens of thousands of people went to see horse-racing history being made and instead saw the horse break down during the race, an unbelievable tragedy that no one is likely to forget. Fans had reason to believe they would see a Triple Crown winner—a horse winning the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes—for the first time since 1978. The Wall Street Journal writer said the grief of the crowd was equal to their initial hope and expectation.
Expectations can lead to surprising outcomes. There is often a fine line between victory and defeat, and it makes me become philosophical in thinking about it. Sometimes the best-laid plans can just blow up in our faces due to uncontrollable events, such as weather conditions or an injury or maybe too much confidence (if there is such a thing). Philosophy is one way to try to comprehend the inexplicable things and events we all encounter at some point in our lives.
I’ve mentioned before that it’s important for us to remain intact, otherwise we become a target. A small leak can sink a ship, or a huge wave can destroy it equally well, as the yachtsmen from the Volvo race can attest to. Either way, imbalance can create situations that can keep our equilibrium reeling and out of control.
Our country has been a superpower for a short amount of time, if you look at the history of the world. The biggest risk we have now is not being prepared for the future. As we have seen, there are no guarantees, but being ready sure beats being taken by surprise. During WWI, the battle of Gallipoli, no one expected a quarter of a million soldiers to be killed or for the combined British, Australian, New Zealand and French operations to be defeated and repelled by the Turks. It came as a big surprise to them—because they didn’t know what they were getting into.
There are no guarantees, but being ready sure beats being taken by surprise.
– Donald J. Trump
China Today
Globalization is a fact of life in today’s environment. As Robert described China and India as growing economies we must watch, I simply smiled—as once again we have been thinking alike. Many people think it will take years for China and/or India to approach America’s position as the largest economic power. But this may be yet another example of groupthink in process. Both Robert and I have seen their global impact already.
Recently, I was talking to a friend who lives in Europe, and he mentioned the huge amount of coverage China gets over there, compared with what we have about it in the United States. It’s a very big topic there. There are two facts alone about China that will indicate how that country is doing and where that country is going:
1. The first Starbucks opened in China two years ago. There are now more Starbucks in China than in the United States.
2. In the 1970s, Shanghai had exactly one skyscraper. It now has close to 800.
As a builder of skyscrapers and having a Starbucks in Trump Tower, I find those two facts staggering. Those are just two examples, yet easily visualized examples that should bring something home: China is a big force. Its population is such that one in every five people on the entire planet is Chinese. China has a vibrant economy and workforce and has adapted very well to the new technology. The Chinese are industrious and disciplined. What does this mean? We can either close our eyes and be blown aside, or we can study China and position ourselves to benefit from the changes.
India Today
My two eldest children, Don Jr. and Ivanka, who work at the Trump Organization, were in India recently, so I decided to do some research of my own. But first a story that happened recently at Trump Tower:
Last year, an employee of mine was taking a car service to the airport and was picked up at Trump Tower. The driver was a young man from India, and it was his first trip as a driver to the airport, but he was more interested in finding out if his passenger had ever seen Mr. Donald Trump. My employee replied, “Yes, about five minutes ago.”
The driver was very impressed and said, “You saw Donald Trump five minutes ago? In Trump Tower?”
“Yes, his office is there, and we work there.”
The young man was even more impressed. He said, “You mean Donald Trump works?!” He couldn’t believe his ears. So my employee proceeded to explain the reality of my life, which is long hours in the office, and that we have Post-its, pencils, copy machines and everything else that any office has.
The driver remained impressed and then decided to explain some things about his country while he was navigating his way to the airport. He gave a history of India that was condensed to a few minutes. He also explained that there were hundreds of languages and dialects in his country, a different accent every 30 miles, but that no matter if you were in the provinces somewhere or in Punjab, there were two words everybody knew.
It was my employee’s turn to be curious, and she asked, “What are they?”
The driver took his hands off the wheel to act out and say “You’re fired!” with great glee.
My employee had a good laugh and then kindly asked him if he knew where the airport was, and he said not to worry, he would try to find it. Which, I’m happy to say, he did and with no problem. He obviously had a very good sense of direction, as well as a sense of sharing about his country.
Do we have any sense of the direction India is going? Do we know anything about India?
Here are a few facts to get us going:
• India is the world’s largest, oldest continuous civilization.
• In the last 10,000 years, India has never invaded any country.
• India is the world’s largest democracy.
• India is one of the few countries in the world that gained independence without violence.
• The art of navigation was born in the river Sindh 6,000 years ago. (Maybe that’s where that young driver was from).
• Sanskrit is the mother of all the European languages.
• India was the richest country on earth until the 17th Century, when the British invaded.
• Chess was invented in India.
• India invented the number system. Albert Einstein said: “We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made.”
• Algebra, trigonometry and calculus originated in India.
• The value of “pi” was first calculated by the mathematician Budhayana, and he explained the concept of what is known as the Pythagorean Theorem. He discovered it in the 6th century, which was long before European mathematicians.
• India is the largest English-speaking nation in the world.
My point is that India is definitely worth looking into and knowing something about. Plus, 38 percent of doctors in the United States are of Indian descent, and 12 percent of scientists are as well. They represent the wealthiest of all ethnic groups in the United States as well as globally. Education is stressed and many Indians run large U.S. and global corporations.
India itself has become a major economic force on its own once again and deserves our attention, not just as a destination point or a piece of history. India is important to our future, and as globally aware citizens, we need to spend some time learning about this fascinating and dynamic country.
It definitely means the world has some very viable competition, specifically in China and India! Which is good—I’ve always believed that competition can get rid of complacency, and fast. Mark Twain said: “Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”
That can apply to a lot of things. Let’s give that some thought. How can you use this information to your advantage? The rich will spot the opportunities, while the poor will hide their heads and pretend it isn’t happening.
Can you spot opportunities that may arise from these economic changes?
