My Note
My highlights
57 highlights from Kindle. These are the lines I stopped at.
A corporation is merely a legal document that creates a legal body without a soul.
It was popular because the income-tax rate of a corporation is less than the individual income-tax rates. In addition, certain expenses could be paid by a corporation with pre-tax dollars.
The problem is that the people who lose are the uninformed: the ones who get up every day and diligently go to work and pay taxes.
Every time people try to punish the rich, the rich don’t simply comply.
Real estate is one investment vehicle that has a great tax advantage.
As long as you keep trading up in value, you will not be taxed on the gains until you liquidate.
People who don’t take advantage of these legal tax savings are missing a great opportunity to build their asset columns.
knowledge is power. And with money comes great power that requires the right knowledge to keep it and make it multiply.
Without that knowledge, the world pushes you around.
“Who are you working for? Who are you making rich?”
focusing on my own business and developing assets made me a better employee because I now had a purpose.
My money was working hard to make more money. Each dollar in my asset column was a great employee, working hard to make more employees and buy the boss a new Porsche with before-tax dollars.
The rich hide much of their wealth using vehicles such as corporations and trusts to protect their assets from creditors.
But I will say that if you own any kind of legitimate assets, I would consider finding out more about the benefits and protection offered by a corporation as soon as possible.
Garret Sutton’s books on corporations provide wonderful insight into the power of personal corporations.
In 1984, I began teaching via games and simulations, and I still rely on these tools today. I always encourage adult students to look at games as reflecting back to them what they know and what they need to learn.
Most importantly, games reflect behavior. They are instant feedback systems.
Just like a board game, the world is always providing us with instant feedback. We could learn a lot if we tuned in more.
That is the purpose of the game: to teach players to think and create new and various financial options.
The players who get out of the Rat Race the quickest are the people who understand numbers and have creative financial minds.
Rich people are often creative and take calculated risks.
There are a lot of people who have a lot of money and do not get ahead financially.
I have watched people playing CASHFLOW complain that the right opportunity cards are not coming their way. So they sit there. I know people who do that in real life. They wait for the right opportunity.
Most people have an opportunity of a lifetime flash right in front of them, and they fail to see it. A year later, they find out about it, after everyone else got rich.
Financial intelligence is simply having more options.
It is not so much what happens, but how many different financial solutions you can think of to turn a lemon into millions.
It is how creative you are in solving financial problems.
So why would you want to increase your financial intelligence? Because you want to be the kind of person who creates your own luck.
Few people realize that luck is created, just as money is. And if you want to be luckier and create money instead of working hard, then your financial intelligence is important.
“The poor and middle class work for money,” he would say. “The rich make money. The more real you think money is, the harder you will work for it. If you can grasp the idea that money is not real, you will grow richer faster.”
“What we agree it is,”
The single most powerful asset we all have is our mind. If it is trained well, it can create enormous wealth seemingly instantaneously. An untrained mind can also create extreme poverty that can crush a family for generations.
I develop my financial IQ because I want to participate in the fastest game and biggest game in the world. And in my own small way, I would like to be part of this unprecedented evolution of humanity, the era where humans work purely with their minds and not with their bodies.
Besides, it is where the action is. It is what is happening. It’s hip. It’s scary. And it’s fun.
Enter NIR—negative interest rates or interest rates below zero.
It cost a valuable asset, my time, to go out looking for them.
money being only an agreement.
Time is one of your greatest assets.
The point I would like to make is that investments come and go. The market goes up and comes down. Economies improve and crash. The world is always handing you opportunities of a lifetime, every day of your life, but all too often we fail to see them.
Another case for developing your financial intelligence over a lifetime is simply that more opportunities are presented to you.
The more we learn—and there is a lot to learn—the more money we make simply because we gain experience and wisdom as the years go on.
We have friends who are playing it safe, working hard at their profession, and failing to gain financial wisdom, which does take time to develop.
Our overall philosophy is to plant seeds inside my asset column. That is my formula.
It is not gambling if you know what you’re doing. It is gambling if you’re just throwing money into a deal and praying.
The idea in anything is to use your technical knowledge, wisdom, and love of the game to cut the odds down, to lower the risk.
If you keep your living expenses modest, $100,000 coming in as additional income is pleasant, regardless of whether you work.
The beauty of a solid base of real estate is that it allows me to take greater risks, as I do with speculative stocks.
“I don’t know how to do that here—yet.”
Great opportunities are not seen with your eyes. They are seen with your mind.
Most people never get wealthy simply because they are not trained financially to recognize opportunities right in front of them.
In the final chapter of this book, I offer 10 steps that I followed on the road to my financial freedom. But always remember to have fun. When you learn the rules and the vocabulary of investing and begin to build your asset column, I think you’ll find that it’s as fun a game as you’ve ever played.
Yet if you look at the way humans are designed to learn, we learn by making mistakes. We learn to walk by falling down.
If we never fell down, we would never walk. The same is true for learning to ride a bike. I still have scars on my knees, but today I can ride a bike without thinking. The same is true for getting rich.
Unfortunately, the main reason most people are not rich is because they are terrified of losing.
Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are.
Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.
I look at money much like my game of tennis. I play hard, make mistakes, correct, make more mistakes, correct, and get better.