sinkie herd mentality. a lot of sinkies read the book and feel like you now. tried doing what he preached and failed. its classified as self help book for goodness sake. not some get rich guide book. it will make u feel good after reading it. but a lot of things inside is fundamentally wrong. since u r so in it and so clever, u gotta spot the mistakes he made yourself.
Kiyosaki worked for me. I read the book and it contained no "get rich quick formula". However, it did help me change my mindset and gave me the courage to make the transition from employee to self employed to employer after all the advantages of doing so were succinctly illustrated in layman's terms.
I'll give the simplest example of the huge advantage a home based business provides when it comes to taxes :
Let's say you earn $150,000 a year as an employee. Your income is taxed at source. For illustration, we'll plug in the figure of 25% taxes so that's $37,500 to the govt and you're left with $112,500. Because you're employed, the govt always takes a first bite of your pie and it's usually with some sort of PAYE scheme so they get the money up front.
From this $112,500 that the govt leaves you with, you then have to pay all your bills and that includes essentials, leisure, food, holidays, hobbies etc. In a typical household, that's usually about 80% to 90% of your take home pay so you may end up with $11,250 to save or invest.
However, if you're running a business from home, you charge as much as you can to the business. That'll include you phone bills, your utilities, a chunk of your transport costs, depreciation of all your equipment.. eg iPhone, iPad, computer, monitor, printer, modem etc. If you travel on business, you charge that too.
With the help of a good accountant, you'll find yourself making only a small profit at the end of the financial year and it is this figure that the govt collects its share from. If your business makes $10,000 per year before tax, then the govt gets 25% of $10,000 instead of 25% of $150,000. (assuming that the tax rates are the same for simplicity). The big difference is that the your personal expenditure has been reclassified as business overheads as a result in your change in the approach to money. Your standard of living has not changed but you've saved yourself a huge chunk of $$$ which would otherwise have gone to the IRD.
Photography is my hobby but in order to minimise my taxes, I've registered my hobby as a business so I'm depreciating all my camera equipment. When I go for a holiday, I take a shit load of photos and upload them to a commercial stock photography site where they are offered for sale. This enables me to charge my whole holiday as a business expense. It doesn't matter if nobody buys the images. As long as they're taken for the purpose of sale, the trip is tax deductible.
The computer I'm typing this message on, the electricity it's using, my internet connection, the computer and photography magazines that I subscribe to, the coffee machine at home, the printer ink cartridges, software, hosting charges, phone bills, home security system monitoring, upgrades, maintenance etc etc are ALL charged to the business. I'd be spending all this money anyway so it would be lunacy not to classify these items as business overheads. That's the RK mantra and I subscribe to it 100%
The govt taxes what is left after I've decided how much I want to spend. As an employee, it would be the other way round. The govt would tax what I earn at source and I'd then be left with a considerably reduced figure to spend on myself.