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I saw this at the bookstore and I couldn’t help myself. Well, I could help myself a little bit by getting it from the library for free. This is Donald’s latest book, and it is co-authored with Robert Kiyosaki, who is only a millionnaire, but is rich like Donald is.

Theirs is a philosophy that is not about saving passively and diversifying, it is about being financially intelligent. They state that the type of investing that they do is not risky, because they study what they do and are active investors. It’s a contrarian philosophy to everything we are told constantly by the financial services industry, which they imply exists to manage our money, and make a lot of cash from doing so.

All of that aside, I enjoyed reading about the life philosophy of these two gentlemen. I love a good story, and there is a good story in someone who has gained and lost as much as Donald has. Robert is a bit more open about some of the aspects of his upbringing, his experience in Vietnam, and later on as a real estate tycoon. But both of them talk about their failures and lessons learned. For whatever reason, I do admire Donald Trump, because beneath the ego, he does have a human quality to him (and he is a human being after all).

The stories about Robert’s Vietnam service were chilling, and this statement that he throws in:

“As a pilot in Vietnam in 1972, I realized we were not fighting to stop communism. I realized we were fighting for oil and for big oil corporations. Today, we are in the same war - different countries, same corporations”

At the same, he is affectionately not technologically enabled - “Not only am I obsolete, I am becoming more rapidly more obsolete with each new technological change that comes along. I once bought an iPod but could not figure out how to put information into it or how to get anything out of it.” Umm…don’t you just plug it in?

In any event, I thought this was an enjoyable read - advice about being rich aside, there’s a bit of education about how our financial system works in the macro level and how folks like Donald leverage it to its maximum.