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Fake
Robert Kiyosaki
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What is Fake about?
This book is about three specific fake attributes; fake money that can make the rich richer and at the same time make the poor and middle class poorer.
Key ideas of Fake
Fiat Money Erodes Savings
Since 1971 the dollar has been backed by debt alone, so inflation steadily transfers wealth away from savers and toward asset owners.
Financial Education Is Absent
Schools train people to become employees, leaving them without the accounting, tax, and investing knowledge that wealthy families pass down privately.
Cash Flow Defines Real Assets
A true asset puts money into your pocket every month, making rental real estate and operating businesses superior to homes, mutual funds, or 401(k) plans.
Read an excerpt from the summary
Fake: Fake Money, Fake Teachers, Fake Assets — by Robert Kiyosaki
The Argument in One Breath
Robert Kiyosaki opens *Fake* with a claim that sounds outrageous until you sit with it for a while. He says three things in your life are almost certainly counterfeit. The money in your wallet is counterfeit. The teachers who told you how to handle that money were counterfeit. And the so-called assets they pushed you into — the mutual funds, the 401(k), the family home — are counterfeit too. Three fakes, layered on top of each other, hiding in plain sight. He is not whispering this. He is shouting it across 450 pages, in capital letters, with stick-figure drawings and the same charts repeated three or four times because he wants you to actually look at them.
This is the angriest book in Kiyosaki's catalog. *Rich Dad Poor Dad* was a coming-of-age story about two fathers and a small boy learning the difference between income and cash flow. *Fake*, published in 2019, has no warmth left. It is a manifesto. He is convinced the middle class is being quietly stripped of everything it owns by a system that congratulates them for participating in their own decline. He wants you angry too, because in his view anger is the only thing that will get a saver to stop saving, a worker to stop trusting his pension, and an honest taxpayer to stop calling his house an asset.
The question the rest of the book answers is simple. If the money is fake, and the teachers are fake, and the assets are fake, then what is real, and how do you get some?
The Ghost of Buckminster Fuller
Before he launches into the three fakes, Kiyosaki spends time on the man he says shaped his entire worldview. Buckminster Fuller, the architect and futurist who invented the geodesic dome, was Kiyosaki's teacher in the early 1980s. Kiyosaki attended a week-long event with Fuller in 1981 called "The Future of Business," and he says that week broke his mind open the same way Vietnam had broken it open a decade earlier. He went back twice more before Fuller died in 1983.
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Continue in the appWho is it for?
- Anyone who wants to understand why saving dollars in a bank account produces declining purchasing power over time.
- Anyone who feels unprepared for retirement and suspects their 401(k) and mutual funds are not working in their favor.
- Anyone who is curious about real estate investing and wants a blunt case for owning income-producing property.
- Anyone who is skeptical of mainstream financial advice and wants a framework for evaluating what their bank and employer actually recommend.
About the author: Robert Kiyosaki
Robert Kiyosaki is an American entrepreneur, investor, and personal finance author best known for Rich Dad Poor Dad, published in 1997, which became one of the best-selling personal finance books of all time. He built his career as a real estate and small business investor before turning to writing and financial education.
His Rich Dad brand includes books, board games, and seminars centered on cash flow, leverage, and financial independence. Kiyosaki is a consistent critic of conventional financial advice and the formal education system's approach to money.
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