I read Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki in the early 2000s, when it was already a famous book but not yet the global phenomenon it later became.
I read it as a financial advisor registered with the Italian Financial Advisors Register, with the curiosity of someone looking for every possible way to look at the same thing.
And that book left two things on me: one I kept and one I left along the way.
The thing I kept is a simple intuition, but for anyone who has never studied accounting it is extremely powerful: not everything you own is the same.
Some of the things you own put money in your pockets — an apartment rented out, a share that pays dividends, a business that produces profits.
Others of the things you own pull money out of your pockets, month after month — the car, the home you live in, the wardrobe, the recreational boat.
Most people, until the moment they read a page that presents this distinction, have never thought about it in these terms. They just think "I have so much in the bank" and "I have my home". They don't distinguish. They don't see the direction.
Kiyosaki popularized this distinction like few others in the world. And we are grateful for that.
The thing I left along the way is the how Kiyosaki sold this intuition to the world, and everything he attached to it in the years that followed.
In Cashfulness we built something that starts from the same intuition, but walks in a different direction.
In this article I want to explain where we are close to Kiyosaki, and where we move away from him.
What Kiyosaki got right
To be fair to an author who has sold over forty million copies, it's worth starting from what he got right.
There are at least three things.
He broke the culture of the static balance.
For generations, people thought of their financial health by looking at the checking account balance.
Kiyosaki helped shift that attention to something more dynamic: what your possessions produce, and what they cost you.
It's a shift of perspective that changes everything. Not how much you are worth, but in which direction you are going.
He dismantled the equation "homeownership = investment".
For the 20th-century Italian culture, buying a home was automatically an investment.
Kiyosaki put it in writing, with simple examples, that a home you live in — as long as you live in it, you pay the mortgage, you pay the taxes and the maintenance — isn't putting money in your pockets.
It's a life choice, perhaps a right one, but it's not a productive asset in the strict sense.
On this point Cashfulness is in full agreement, and we discussed it in detail in the article dedicated to Assets+ and Assets- in this blog.
He encouraged reflection on independence from income from work alone.
The idea that one's capital can, over time, work for us as much as we work for it, is a liberating idea.
Cashfulness shares it, and puts it at the center of the concept of financial independence: having enough Assets+ to cover one's ordinary expenses.
On these three things, we are in his debt. Period. Without polemic.
What Kiyosaki exaggerated (or got wrong)
Having said that, the "Kiyosaki package" doesn't end with the three points above.
On the contrary, most of what came out of the book in the twenty years that followed goes in a direction we don't want to follow.
Aggression as method.
Kiyosaki builds many of his messages on a structure of enemies: the school system that makes you dependent, the "Poor Dad" who is the poor father not to imitate, the financial advisors trying to cheat you, the employees who are "slaves" of the rat race.
It's polarizing rhetoric. It works for selling books.
It doesn't work for building calm.
In Cashfulness we don't build enemies. There is no "bad" system to contrast with a "saving" method. There is a confused picture to make clear, and that's all.
Real estate as religion.
In the years following the book, Kiyosaki shifted more and more toward a very specific prescription: buying rental properties, possibly with leverage (debt), as the main path to independence.
In Cashfulness we don't prescribe any specific asset class.
Assets+ can be real estate, but also funds, ETFs, bonds that pay coupons, dividends, stakes in business activities, intellectual property works that generate licenses.
Which mix is right for you depends on your life, your character, the country you live in, the historical moment, your age.
Cashfulness doesn't have a single answer because the question doesn't have a single answer.
The promise of wealth.
The subtext of Kiyosaki is "you will become rich if you follow the method".
Cashfulness doesn't promise wealth.
Wealth is a vague and culturally loaded term, and we don't sell dreams.
We promise clarity, and from there the choices are yours, and it's your choices that determine what you become.
Cashfulness is the tool, not the result.
FIRE and the exit from the rat race.
A good portion of the FIRE movement — Financial Independence, Retire Early — has roots in the echo of Kiyosaki. The idea that the final objective is to stop working as soon as possible.
Cashfulness is not against financial independence. As I said, it puts it at the center.
But the freedom we want to help you build is not an escape: it is a choice.
When you arrive at the point where your Assets+ cover your ordinary expenses, you are free. From there you could stop working.
Many continue by choice, because the work nourishes them or because there is a work they want to complete. Others slow down. Others change profession. Others dedicate themselves to family, grandchildren, a passion, a volunteer association.
Freedom is being able to choose. Not the obligation to flee.
The guru tone.
In the last fifteen years Kiyosaki has become a media figure who sells courses for thousands of euros, launches catastrophist predictions on markets, profiles a guru style.
It is not our style, it is not our craft, it is not our brand.
Cashfulness wants you as a conscious adult, not as a disciple.
Different vocabulary, more solid engine
There is also a technical difference worth briefly naming.
Kiyosaki uses the pair asset / liability: two binary, simplified categories.
Cashfulness uses Assets+ and Assets- — Italian vocabulary, sober, and above all resting on a complete system of double-entry bookkeeping, the same technique companies have used for six hundred years to keep their books.
The difference is not only lexical.
Double-entry bookkeeping shows not only what you own and what you owe, but how the flows move over time, and lets you see financial health with four distinct categories (Assets, Liabilities, Costs, Revenues) instead of two.
The frame is more solid. We told it in the article on double-entry bookkeeping for non-accountants, in this blog.
And you'll find it explained in a practical way, with examples and with GNUCash as a teaching tool, in the book I wrote — Strategie per la Finanza Personale (in Italian), available on Amazon. It's the book I wish I had found twenty years ago, after reading Kiyosaki.
Who Cashfulness is for, if you've read Kiyosaki
There is a person who has read Rich Dad Poor Dad and took something good from it — the asset/liability distinction entered their way of thinking about money.
But they also tried to put it into practice following the author's screenplay — courses, rental real estate with aggressive leverage, the idea of having to "exit the rat race" within a few years — and they found themselves anxious, under pressure, with a financial life more complex than before and less serene than they had hoped.
Or they read the book, understood the point, but stopped there because the rest of the package — the tone, the urgency, the ostentation — didn't belong to them.
For this person Cashfulness is a proposal of calm evolution.
Same starting intuition, much more solid frame, respectful vocabulary, no promise of wealth, no rush to "exit the rat race", no guru on the podium.
There is a method. It applies with calm. It works over time, not in the thirty days following a seminar.
And if you have never read Kiyosaki but ended up on this article by other paths, that's fine too.
Nothing we say here depends on having read Kiyosaki. The distinction between Assets+ and Assets- you'll find told on its own terms, inside Cashfulness, with no need to have passed through Rich Dad.
In summary
Three things, one on top of the other, to close.
Kiyosaki popularized an important intuition. We openly acknowledge it.
Kiyosaki built on top of that intuition a method, a tone, and a promise we don't share. We openly say it.
Cashfulness proposes a calm evolution of that same intuition, without polemic and without endorsement, based on a rigorous accounting system (double-entry bookkeeping) and on a more sober promise (clarity, not wealth).
If you are the first person I described — someone who has read Kiyosaki and took something from it, but doesn't recognize themselves in the aggression — Cashfulness is probably the place for you.
We're waiting for you on the beta waitlist at cashfulness.com/beta.
If, instead, you are a convinced follower of the classic Kiyosaki method — courses, aggressive real estate, FIRE as main objective — you won't be at ease in Cashfulness, and that's right.
The world is big, there are tools for every style.
Cashfulness is designed for those who seek calm and method together. From that frame, that's what we do, and it's the only thing we do.
— Vittorio