Wisdom of Rich Dad

If only our earliest encounters with money, like getting a quarter for cleaning our room or a whole dollar from the Tooth Fairy, taught us what we would need to know about personal finance. Instead, we learned the hard way by growing up.

A lightbulb flickered in my head in fifth grade when I realized my $10 weekly lunch allowance didn’t need to be spent on cafeteria pizza. By saving $2 a week for two months, I could buy my first Backstreet Boys CD. It was a moment I’d never forget, for it finally dawned on me exactly what money was worth — anything I wanted.

Over the years, I traded school lunch for CDs, birthday money for movie tickets, and even college textbook money for new boots. The exchange value of money, as I like to call it, grew larger and grander as I moved into my early 20′s. I likely “exchanged” thousands of dollars before I graduated college, yet still hadn’t learned how to manage my finances. By the time I got my first job, I spent more on food and happy hour than on rent and found myself in serious credit card debt. Obviously, I still didn’t have a clue about money management.

Read the rest of this entry »

Actor and investor Ashton Kutcher took the stage with Charlie Rose at TechCrunch Disrupt this morning.

Kutcher didn’t talk about his new stint on Two and a Half Men, but he did talk about his fund, A Grade, and how he makes investing decisions.

He says he looks for six things:

1. Problem solvers

2. Good founders

3. Servers crashing

4. Market need and want

5. Fixing a signal to noise issue

6. Trust

He explains, “I look for problem solvers. Are you solving a problem for a large subset of people? Then I look at the founders and who they are. I go to Y Combinator all the time and Paul Graham is one of the people who taught me how to look at these things.”

“Another good thing is to invest in companies that are just trying to keep their servers up,” he says. “Beyond that, I look at the market need or want, and what the consumer will want.”

“As an actor, when we receive a script, we start breaking down every character by their want. Every character has an objective and a super objective. So what I frequently do is look at technology the same way. I’ll think, I’m a user of this platform. What do I want and how badly do I want it? How much friction am I willing to put up with to get what I want, and where can you eliminate that friction to get me what I want faster?”

“What I look for is trust — will [consumers] trust this application to solve their needs? Are [the founders] solving a signal to noise issue, i.e. are they eliminating some of the noise [that's a problem in social media and online]?”

CANNES, France — Exploring the intersection of celebrity, glamor and personal finance is the raison d’etre for The Price of Fame — so who better than Aishwarya Rai as a subject? The Bollywood actress and model has $35 million to her name, according to celebritynetworth.com, and 60 Minutes dubbed her the most beautiful woman in the world.

TPOF caught up with Rai, 37, at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday to discuss money. After some gentle encouragement, Rai revealed that the most important financial advice she has learned is to adapt her expectations for each project, from low-budget to blockbuster. “You have to take each film for what it is, rather than having a rule book,” she said. “That’s what we actors do.”

Rai, on the Croisette to promote her new movie, Heroine, operates in a different economic stratosphere than most of us. Her fortune, already considerable when she was a single woman, is even greater now that she’s married to Bollywood hero Abhishek Bachchan, from India’s premier acting family. Still, TPOF couldn’t resist asking whether she was a saver or a splurger.

“I’m realistic and I’m practical,” Rai replied.

Maybe her middle-class upbringing is still an influence. Rai had no inkling that she wanted to be part of show business as a child. She was on track to receive an architectural degree until she entered the Miss World Pageant on a whim at age 21 and won. Film and modeling offers poured in, and she rapidly rose to become the most recognizable face of Indian cinema. She has appeared in 44 films, according to IMDB. Rai is best known stateside as the face of L’Oreal cosmetics and for her role in 2009′s The Pink Panther 2 and 2004′s Bride and Prejudice. In Heroine, she will play close to type as an Indian cinema icon who endures ups and downs. But she insists the movie is not autobiographical.

While the fun and glitz of Cannes help create a “cinema village” built on the love of movies, she said, she never forgets why she’s here. “This an industry.”

Rich Dad Education seminars travel to cities around the country with the enticing promise of teaching people how to become rich. But some of its dissatisfied customers say the seminars have done the opposite — and left them in debt.

Sarah Newsome recently graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia. On top of paying back her student loans, she also now has about $7,250 in credit card debt after signing up for an advanced Rich Dad real estate investment course.

She waited a week to ask for a refund, missing the company’s three-day refund window. Still, she thinks she should get a full refund because she never attended a class. On top of that, when she tried to use the course software that was supposed to identify potential investment opportunities, she said, she didn’t find any local properties in the database.

She had paid $500 to attend an initial three-day Rich Dad seminar last summer. It seemed legitimate enough, she said. After all, it was associated with the best-selling book “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki. And on the first day, she did learn some things about real estate.

Read the rest of this entry »

Reason #1:

Robert Kiyosaki’s books saved me from a life of struggle during my retirement age. His message was that you have to have passive income from either a business or an investment. I had a business at the time (sole proprietor, not really a business) and thought okay now I need to invest in real estate like Robert Kiyosaki. That was a life changing decision.

Everything he said made sense. Buy property based on cash flow not on appreciation. I started reading everything I could on real estate investing and decided a condo or small single family home make sense as investments.

Reason #2

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »