Rich Dad Poor Dad review: the world's best-selling money book — and why we can't recommend it

By Robert T. Kiyosaki (1997) · Review last updated: 1 August 2026

Author

Robert T. Kiyosaki

First published

1997

Length

336 pages · 5–6 hours

Difficulty

Beginner-friendly

UK relevance

LowBuilt on US real estate, US tax loopholes and US corporate structures. Almost none of the specific advice maps to the UK.

Audiobook

Fine on audioWorks fine on audio — the repetition is arguably easier to forgive at 1.5x speed.

Rich Dad Poor Dad is, by most counts, the best-selling personal finance book ever written — over 30 million copies in dozens of languages since 1997. You will find it recommended in a thousand YouTube videos and get-motivated reading lists. We read it cover to cover so we could review it properly, and here is our honest conclusion: it contains one genuinely useful idea, wrapped in a story that may not be true, padded with advice that ranges from vague to actively risky — and it functions, ultimately, as the front door to a seminar business. We review books so you know where your money’s best spent. This one, for most UK readers, is a skip.

That’s not contrarianism for its own sake. Let’s be fair to the book first.

What the book actually says

Kiyosaki frames the book as lessons from his two “dads”: his real father — the “poor dad”, a highly educated Hawaiian education official who worked hard, valued job security and died with little — and his best friend’s father, the “rich dad”, an unschooled businessman who built an empire and taught the young Kiyosaki how money really works.

The core lessons: the rich don’t work for money — money works for them. Buy assets (things that put money in your pocket: businesses, investment property, shares) and minimise liabilities (things that take money out — including, provocatively, your own home). Financial literacy isn’t taught in schools, which is why educated professionals stay trapped in the “rat race” of earning and spending. The middle class buys liabilities it believes are assets; the rich build asset columns first and let those pay for luxuries. Corporations let the rich earn, spend, then pay tax, while employees are taxed before they see a penny. Fear and self-doubt, not lack of opportunity, keep most people poor. Work to learn, not to earn.

Credit where due: the asset/liability reframing is a genuinely good piece of mental furniture. Plenty of people trace an awakening about money to this book, and the observation that a mortgaged home costs you money every month rather than paying you is a bracing corrective to “property is always an investment” thinking — arguably more relevant to the UK’s property-obsessed culture, not less. As a motivational jolt — “your salary alone will not make you wealthy; you need assets” — the book has real force. That is its five points out of ten for mindset.

Who it’s for

Honestly? A narrow group. If you’ve never once questioned the script “get a safe job, buy the biggest house you can, work until 68”, this book is a cheap and readable jolt — and some readers need the jolt more than they need accuracy. If that’s you, borrow it from the library, take the asset/liability idea, and put it down before the property chapters.

Who should skip it

Almost everyone else, and especially: anyone looking for practical steps (there are none — the book is explicit that it teaches “mindset”, and specifics are perpetually deferred); UK readers hoping to apply it (see below); anyone in or near debt, for whom the book’s cavalier attitude to leverage — borrowing to buy “assets” — is the last thing needed; and anyone who might be tempted by what’s upsold next.

Criticisms and counterpoints

This is the longest criticisms section on our shelf, for cause.

The “rich dad” may not exist as described. Kiyosaki has given shifting accounts of who the rich dad was, and decades of journalistic digging (most exhaustively by investor-author John T. Reed) has never satisfactorily identified him; at points Kiyosaki has described the book’s framing as that of a storyteller. Perhaps that’s fine for a parable — but the book’s authority rests entirely on “these are the real lessons of a real rich man”, and the reader deserves to know that premise is, at best, unverifiable.

The advice is vague where it matters and risky where it’s specific. “Buy assets” — which, how, with what money, at what risk? The book doesn’t say; that’s what the follow-up products are for. Where it is specific, it leans on 1980s–90s US tactics: creative real-estate deals, heavy leverage, using corporate structures to have the company pay for expenses before tax. Much of that translates poorly to any era, and several of the tax manoeuvres described would be inadvisable or simply not lawful for an ordinary UK employee. The book also repeatedly disparages diversification and conventional retirement saving — the exact strategies with the strongest evidence base for ordinary people.

The business behind the book. The Rich Dad brand’s real product is education: books feeding seminars feeding more expensive seminars. Media investigations — including a 2021 CBC Marketplace undercover report — have documented free “Rich Dad” events used to sell training packages running to tens of thousands of dollars. (One Kiyosaki company, Rich Global LLC, went through bankruptcy in 2012 after a dispute with a seminar promoter — corporate structures being used exactly as the book teaches, one might note.) None of this makes the paperback’s ideas automatically wrong, but a money book should be judged partly on what it’s for, and this one is the top of a sales funnel.

The UK translation problem is near-total. The tax chapters are US tax. The property playbook assumes US markets, US financing and US landlord economics. “Your house is not an asset” lands differently in a country where housing works as it does here — the observation still provokes usefully, but the strategy built on it doesn’t transfer. A UK reader finishes the book with a changed attitude and precisely nothing they can do next — the worst combination, because motivated-but-directionless readers are whom the seminar industry feeds on.

The poor dad deserved better. It’s a small thing, but telling: the book’s contempt for the educated, secure, public-service “poor dad” — a man who by every account lived decently — reflects its value system. Wealth is the scorecard; everything else is fear talking. Plenty of readers find that energising. We’d just note that the best evidence on money and wellbeing (see Housel, ironically a far better book) points the other way: security and autonomy, not net worth as a score.

Verdict

Skip it — 4/10 (borrow from the library if you’re curious). The one great idea — build assets, not liabilities — is real, free, and now yours: we’ve just given it to you. What surrounds it is an unverifiable parable, dated US tactics, hostility to the boring strategies that actually work, and a funnel to expensive seminars. Thirty million copies don’t make it good; they make it successful — and the difference between those two things is, fittingly, the most useful lesson this book can teach.

Read this instead

• The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel — the mindset shift without the baggage.
• Money: A User’s Guide by Laura Whateley — what to actually do, in the UK system.
• How to start investing — the evidence-based version of “make money work for you”.

Book details refer to the Plata Publishing 25th-anniversary edition (2022, 336pp; first published 1997).

Just so you know: this guide is information and journalism, not financial advice, and we don't recommend specific financial products. Your circumstances are your own — if you need personal advice, speak to a suitably qualified adviser. Information was correct at the "last updated" date above but things change; always check the linked primary sources.

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