Kiyosaki is an idiot, or rather he’s smartly selling idiotic advice. Ask him where he got his money. Real estate? hmmm Selling books to millions of saps by telling them how to make millions of dollars? more like it

Also, I don’t think you understand the definition of frugality, so let me help you out: it means economical in use or expenditure; not wasteful. A frugal act can be deciding to not buy that $60,000 car so that you can instead take a $5,000 vacation every year and still pocket the additional $6,000 per year you wouldn’t be paying on your car loan. Then again, if you don’t like vacations and would get more satisfaction and use from the car, then go for it when you save up the cash.

Money is a tool. Waste it, and you’ll struggle. Hoard it, and you will miss out on living. Find the balance that works for you and live your own life. Oh, and stop giving more money to people like Kiyosaki, Trump, and anyone else who sells you the get rich secrets. They only write those books because they sell more copies than prudent financial advice books: they know the true secret to get rich and it lies in your being human analogy. Most people want to be rich, and many will spend themselves into the poor house on books and dvds and seminars that will teach them to be rich. It’s just their human nature. They’ll also spend more on lottery tickets than savings bonds, go figure.

We’re humans, we have the right to enjoy and be happy. So sometimes, we just need to buy us things even if it’s not a necessity. Even if it means sacrificing a month’s savings. “SOMETIMES”

What impressed me about Shepard was that he was willing to WORK, doing whatever necessary to make the money he needed. He didn’t consider anything “beneath” him. Yes, he had the advantages of being a young, physically-fit single male, but he also had the perseverance and ambition to reach his goal.

I read both Ehrenrich’s books. I thought her second one (the one about trying to find a white-collar job in middle age without any real qualifications or experience) was very good. I’ve done several of the jobs in “Nickled And Dimed” and also filthier and more degrading ones, and I can sympathize with the author’s aching back. But I’m still not going to praise an experiment that was designed to fail.

Barbara E. gave herself one to two months per location to see if she could get by. Anyone else, on moving to a new location, expects to struggle the first little while and then learn how to live there cheaply or make the most of a lucky break. Moving around was not the act of someone who expects to succeed.

To presume to “live as poor people live and try to get by” without being willing to actually do as they do (such as building strong social connections, getting a roommate, and staying away from illegal drugs while applying for jobs at drug-free companies) is pretty arrogant.

One of the reason Barbara E. makes so many mistakes in the book and misses the good deals is because although she claims to respect her new peers, she doesn’t respect them enough to ask their advice about where to shop, what to buy, or what other things to try. Maybe that’s why she never applied for a temp agency or at a manpower office, or babysat someone else’s kids. There are plenty of middle-aged, unhealthy women who work more than one job or who moonlight. The author’s age and gender would actually have been an asset for about a quarter of the day labor or temporary work out there. Someone who’s looking for a babysitter is not likely to choose a 22-year-old male over a middle-aged female if all other factors are equal.

Any person should exercise common sense when selecting a roommate, but for the author to be completely unwilling to consider a roommate or a rented room in someone else’s house “because she’s female” is bogus. Female grad students share space all the time. So do an awful lot of female senior citizens. Gender does not entitle a person to a higher level of privacy and security (that is, to a higher standard of living) than her income will support. That’s one principle the author’s working-class peers understood very well. Maybe that’s one reason why they were able to get by, and continue getting by and providing for themselves and their children, while she floundered.

http://hundredgoals.com/2009/06/08/money-advice-from-the-homeless/

I really enjoyed this book by the way and would definately recommend it!

P.S. Ehrenrich reminds me of the author named Andrews (NY Times financial guru) that recently wrote a book about buying too much house with a spendthrift wife. Wrote a book and got out of the red. Many authors work their story to support a pre concieved notion. Hmm, housing market screws people, the man is keeping me down, etc.