My New Plan for Financial Freedom
How Reading Rich Dad Poor Dad Changed My Life
My Perspective on Personal Finances
I’m a French engineer with a major in finance where I studied financial instruments. With a strong mathematical background and programming skills, you would think that I am an excellent investor and you couldn’t be more wrong.
I’ve always been afraid of the risks involved in investing, and my financial background only showed me how everything could go wrong.
Last year, I read the book Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki and I discovered how I had inherited a few things from my (not rich) father:
- Afraid of financial risks
- Not interested in money
- No skills related to my finances
- The cash flow of a poor person with very few assets
- My only source of income is my job
The primary difference between a rich person and a poor person is how they manage fear.
Those are clear signs of a poor or middle-class mind, keeping me from a better financial life. This book is mind-blowing on this aspect, how it opened my eyes and changed how I consider my job and finances. The thing is, I never thought about those topics and I was behaving as described in the book. I was judgmental about friends talking about money for example. And for me, there was no way out of my financial situation.
When I finished the book for the first time, I was suddenly aware that I could change my financial life and stop running with the rat race (trying to get a better salary and in doing so also increasing my expenses, thus never getting anywhere).
The rich focus on their asset columns while everyone else focuses on their income statements.
How Reading Rich Dad Poor Dad Changed My Life
The most important lesson I learned was that I have to invest in my education to improve my life. I then started to read books on negotiation, marketing, and aspects of my career to improve my skills.
Job security meant everything to my educated dad. Learning meant everything to my rich dad.
This changed a lot of things in my life:
- I was able to successfully find freelance projects in a harsh context.
- I tried to negotiate my daily rate as much as I could even though I’m the kind of man who is uncomfortable talking about money.
- I changed jobs for a better one: if I were an employee, this would mean a 40% salary increase in one year.
- I started to read voraciously.
On the investing side, I had a project idea that required a lot of different skills. I wanted to create a trading bot and to do so I had to learn web programming with modern frameworks, train again on mathematics to understand quant strategies, pick the best solutions to connect to financial information, and so on …
I spent time on each of them and in the end, it was a failure, I did not finish it. I had spent so much time on this project without getting to the investment part that I decided to stop.
Last week, I stumbled upon the book and decided to read it again. I quickly realized that in the lessons learned, I had lost my way and forgotten an important part: investing …
My New Plan
Listed below are the most impactful lessons for me:
- Increasing my income by adding new professional skills. The author is all about having diverse skills or being one skill away from being successful. I plan to read as much as possible on my recent job upgrade (functional architect).
- Increasing my financial IQ by reading books on accounting, investing, understanding markets, and law (tax). I have already picked my next two books: Accounting and The Intelligent Investor.
- Starting to invest to have new income/assets.
- Studying the interests of corporations in my country (France).
- Looking for other opportunities by reading, attending training sessions, etc.
I don’t plan to implement everything at the same time. I will be focusing on the first two points for the following weeks (I’ve been focusing on the first point for a year now but I love the results). I will give myself a month to understand accounting and will come back to you.
This time I won’t get fooled by myself. I will keep track of my progress so as not to lose my way again.
Feel free to comment if you have advice, I will gladly read your comments.
All quotations in this article are from Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! by Robert T. Kiyosaki.
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