Rich Dad Poor Dad Review: Why Kiyosaki’s Crash Calls Fail

I read Rich Dad Poor Dad as a teenager, at exactly the right moment — before I had any real money, and young enough for the ideas to rewire me completely. It has sold more than 32 million copies since 1997.

Nobody at school had ever told me that a house can take money out of your pocket every single month. That one sentence changed how I looked at everything I owned.

He was right about the things that mattered. That is exactly why the rest of this is hard to write.

Watch where the money actually goes. Most of us are on a two-stop journey: the pay comes in, and it goes straight back out to the house loan, the car, the card. Nothing stops anywhere in between.

The rich are on a three-stop journey. The pay comes in and buys things — a house somebody rents, a fund, a small business. Those things then pay them, and it is that money, not the salary, that covers the bills.

Look at the two pictures again. On the top row the salary arrow reaches the bills. On the bottom row it never does. Stop working on Monday and the top row stops on Monday. The bottom row keeps paying.

Look at the house you live in. Every month money leaves your wallet and goes out to the mortgage, the repairs, the electricity bill and the water bill. Roughly RM2,400 of it, and none of it comes back.

Now take the identical house and let somebody live in it. Once a month a tenant puts cash into your wallet instead. The mortgage, the repairs and the bills still exist — but the rent covers them, and there is money left over.

Nothing about the building changed. Same bricks, same roof, same loan. Only the direction the money travels. That is the difference between an asset and a liability, and it is why your own home is not the investment you were told it was.

Somewhere around 2011 he stopped being a financial educator and became something else. The message stopped moving. Only the date at the bottom changed.

Nineteen public crash calls between April 2011 and March 2026. Not one of them was followed by the collapse he described.

The first was made with the S&P 500 at 1,332. It is 7,691 today.

Every crimson stake on that chart is a day he told people it was ending. April 2011. May and September 2015. July 2017. August 2018. April and October 2020. August 2021. September 2022. And eleven more after that.

From his first warning to this month the S&P 500 went from 1,332 to 7,691 — a gain of 478%, on price alone, before dividends, which would make it higher.

Six of the nineteen came in the last two years. The market is higher today than it was on every single one of them.

On 26 September 2022 the market had been falling all year, and he told people more crash was coming.

The S&P 500 bottomed sixteen days later, on 12 October 2022. From that day to now it went from 3,851 to 7,691. It exactly doubled.

That was the single worst day in three years to get out. It is the day he told people to.

Look at the shape of it. He warns from the stage. The queue walks past him to the table and pays for the book that explains the warning.

If the crash comes, he was right and sells more books. If it does not come, he warns again and sells more books. He is paid in both outcomes.

The reader who sat in cash for fifteen years waiting is only paid in one of them. The book has sold more than 32 million copies. He has never run a public investment fund.

Here is the objection I get every single time, and it is a fair one: one day he will be right. Yes. He will. Markets really do fall, roughly once every five to seven years. Say it every year and eventually a year turns up when you happened to be saying it.

A stopped clock is right twice a day. Nobody credits the clock. We do not say it finally learned to tell the time — we say it was pointing at twelve the whole while, and twelve came round.

So that is the test to apply to anybody warning you. Was he right because he saw something, or because he never stopped saying it? Nineteen calls in fifteen years, every one pointing the same way, is a stopped clock. When one of them finally lands, it will be the calendar that was right, not the man.

In September 2021 he warned of an imminent crash and told people to buy Bitcoin as protection from it.

Over the next twelve months Bitcoin fell from $43,834 to $19,429 — a fall of 55.7%. The S&P 500 he told you to leave fell about 17.6%. Gold, another of his refuges, lost about 7.6%, and silver about 19.1%.

Gold did hold up, and I will say so. But the one he pushed hardest was the worst of the four places to hide. A crash hedge that falls three times harder than the thing it is hedging is not a hedge.

Two people, same money, same start. April 2011, the month of his first warning. RM500 a month, every month, no exceptions.

The first one listened. He kept the money in a fixed deposit at 3.0% a year and waited for the all-clear. Each year another warning came, and each year he stayed on the sidelines.

185 payments later he has RM117,425. He paid in RM92,500 of that himself. Fifteen years of discipline earned him RM24,925.

The second one never read a forecast. He bought the S&P 500 every month — on the good months and the frightening ones — and he never sold.

He rode 2020 down 19% and 2022 down 20% without touching it. Same 185 payments. Same RM92,500 paid in.

He has RM277,054. That is RM159,630 more than the one who waited, and the only difference between them was who they listened to.

Markets do crash, and I grant him that completely. In 2020 the S&P fell 19% on monthly closes — 34% in 33 days if you watched it daily. In 2022 it fell 20%. The 2000 crash took 49% and the 2008 crash took 57%.

Those were real and they hurt. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something too.

But every single one of them recovered. 2020 was back up in 5 months, 2022 in 14. The crash is not what hurts you. Selling into it, or never starting because you feared one, is what hurts you.