Rich House, Poor House

Financial guru Robert Kiyosaki has turned bearish on the boom he helped create...



- by Carol Lloyd, special to SF Gate



You read the real estate-to-riches books and finally took the plunge. You pulled the equity out of your home and bought another and then another. Despite your income of $45,000 a year, now you're leveraged to the tune of $1.7 million and loving every minute. Because when the properties appreciate you'll have made the nest egg of your dreams. Then you log on to your investment guru's Web site and discover this stunning news: Your real estate dreams are soon to be dust in the wind.



If you want to be smart, buy gold coins.



Such may be the roller-coaster ride of advice for the followers of Robert Kiyosaki. His books -- "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" (1997), "Cashflow Quadrant" (1998), the upcoming "Rich Dad's Before You Quit Your Job" (September, 2005) and nine other titles authored by him and his "Rich Dad Advisors" -- have dominated the best-seller lists for years, selling over 24 million copies in 44 languages worldwide. His infomercials, lectures and classes have reached millions more. This year he was one of several superstars at a two-day, 46,000-person event in Los Angeles called Real Estate Wealth Expo, with this slogan: "One Weekend Can Make You a Millionaire." He's played live at Madison Square Garden, chatted up Oprah on her show and hawked his ideas on everything from CNN to PBS pledge drives.



The essence of his thinking is one of simple financial literacy. Learn about money. Educate yourself financially and you too can learn what the rich have known for eons: Don't work for money, let money -- via the right investments -- work for you. Grow your assets. Shrink your liabilities. But unlike many investment gurus, Kiyosaki, a Hawaiian-born surfer who describes himself as old hippie and environmentalist, despises standard financial planning advice: earn, save and buy a nice collection of mutual funds to supplement your Social Security. Instead, he preaches self-determination through entrepeneurship and for him that has often meant investing in real estate.



But now, in the past couple of months, the man -- whose engaging financial parables have coaxed millions of ordinary under-earning boobs (including yours truly) into the real estate market -- has become a major bubble-blower. On www.richdad.com, which contains a forum for his casual and dedicated followers (including those who pay $100 a year to join his "INSIDERS" club), he's begun posting articles that caution against what might be called "surreal estate exuberance." He cites the Economist at length, including the assertion that "the global housing boom is the biggest financial bubble in history." He confesses that he's currently dumping real estate that produces no cash flow (from rental income) and going "long on gold and oil."



Curious about why one of the foremost real estate boosters had begun to sound like a survivalist in the Utah desert, I caught up with Kiyosaki by phone at his home on Waikiki Beach.



"Don't get me wrong, I'm still buying real estate," he told me, adding that he was in the process of buying seven new properties but that he wasn't buying anything in expectation of appreciation. "I'm an investor, not a speculator. ... I want it to cash flow."



He knows that many others have not been so prudent. "I'm worried about people using their houses as ATM machines," he says, referring to those homeowners who have refinanced their homes to buy cars, remodels or simply more real estate. "And I'm worried about all the people who are flipping properties [those who buy properties in order to immediately resell for a profit] -- that's really stupid right now."



But didn't his books -- despite all their sound financial advice about reducing liabilities and increasing assets -- probably help fuel this real estate craze?



"I think it's so," he concedes.



To be fair, Kiyosaki hasn't recommended that people leverage their homes for real estate riches. One of the key tenets he hammers away at is that a home is not an asset but a liability. "A lot of people think of their homes as real estate," he says. "I don't play games with my home. I own two houses and I'm very attached to them, but I don't get attached to my real estate investment. It's just 'Show me the money' -- if it doesn't cash flow, then I sell it."



The problem is that real estate -- especially as depicted in his books -- stands out as one of the few investments available to cash-poor individuals that can still return an income and long-term profit. Most of us don't have water rights or enough capital for a hedge fund. We don't have successful inventions that bring in royalty checks every month.



At least that's the message I took away when a review copy of "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" fell on my desk in 1998. I recall opening the barely copy-edited, self-published book with a tinge of sympathy. With writing like this, who is this guy going to convince?



But by the next day, I'd read the book cover to cover and committed to changing my ostrich-like attitude about all things financial. I didn't want to be a millionaire, but owning a little wedge of real estate seemed like a better idea than what I had been doing: nothing. Houses were something I could subject to my creativity and fantasy world. They also were something that I felt somehow secure about borrowing on -- even though I'd sooner chop off my earlobe than buy a stock on leverage. Since it was 1998, it was a good time to mistake his advice as Real Estate 101.



Although Kiyosaki's advice may have helped inflate the real estate bubble, he wants me to know that his influence has also had more positive effects. In Australia -- the country with the greatest number of readers per capita of "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" -- the government has decided to create a national program for teaching financial literacy to children. "I would like to take credit for that," he says, "though I don't have any proof."



The real culprit behind the real estate bubble, he contends, is the federal government. "They're printing too much money," he says. "It's Gresham's Law: When bad money enters the system, good money goes into hiding."



Kiyosaki believes the U.S. government has devalued the dollar, weakened the economy and created such distrust of the stock market that people have sought more secure ways to invest their money. And that has driven up real estate values.



"There's been enormous inflation," he explains. "Greenspan walks around saying there's no inflation, but that is based on the Consumer Price Index. They've taken all the assets out -- housing has gone through the roof, my steak has gone through the roof, oil has gone through the roof. In 1997, the price of oil was $10 a barrel -- now it's $57. If that's not inflation, I don't know what is."



Kiyosaki's solution is to invest in oil, gas, gold, silver -- whatever might be a hedge against the coming financial crisis.



If this sounds a little on the eccentric side, the fact is that Kiyosaki has always been something of an iconoclast. "I never diversify, I never get out of debt and I never save money," he explains, adding that he doesn't put much stock in the stock market either. "Do you know why they call them broker -- because they're always broker than you are."



Like most influential self-help gurus, Kiyosaki's power lies in his charm, which is at once self-effacing, brash and disarmingly straightforward. This has allowed him to walk both sides of the street -- as an altruistic educator who shares his knowledge with the average wage earners whose pain he feels and as the calculating, unabashed Machiavellian player who lives to win. In this sense, his sounding the alarm bells about the real estate market may be anything but altruistic. It may be, simply put, good business.



"Please crash, so I can buy some more," he says with a hardy laugh. "I want it to bust anyway. There's more opportunities in a down market."