Roberd Kiyosaki Personal life He is married to Kim Kiyosaki. He was born and raised in Hilo, Hawaii and is a fourth-generation Japanese American, and the son of the late educator Ralph H. Kiyosaki (1919-1991), Kiyosaki is an alumnus of Hilo High School. He attended the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in New York, graduating with the class of 1969 as a deck officer and served in the Marine Corps as a helicopter gunship pilot during the Vietnam War, where he was awarded the Air Medal. Kiyosaki left the Marine Corps in 1974 and got a job selling copy machines for the Xerox Corporation. In 1977, Kiyosaki started a company that brought to market the first nylon and Velcro "surfer" wallets, which grew into a moderate success. In the early 1980s Kiyosaki started a business in which he licensed T-shirts for Heavy Metal rock bands but the business failed and he allegedly had to declare bankruptcy and ultimately became homeless.[4] Kiyosaki became active in a personal growth seminar, called "Money & You", which was started by Marshall Thurber. These 3-1/2 day seminars were taught around the US and Canada. The premise of the seminar was teaching the works of Buckminster Fuller and promoting the concepts of win/win and personal responsibility. When Thurber gave up the business in 1985 Kiyosaki took over the seminar business with Thurber's former partner, D.C. Cordova. They taught the course to a large number of students primarily in Australia and New Zealand. In 1994 at the age of 47 he shut down the business because of adverse publicity in Australia and "retired". Around 1996–1997 he formed Cashflow Technologies, Inc. which operates and owns the Rich Dad (and Cashflow) brand. There is much controversy over the integrity of his history.

 His teachings A large part of Kiyosaki's teachings focus on generating passive income by means of investment opportunities, such as real estate and small businesses, with the ultimate goal of being able to support oneself by such investments alone. In tandem with this, Kiyosaki defines "assets" as things that generate money, such as rental properties or businesses, and "liabilities" as things that cost money, such as house payments, cars and so on. Kiyosaki also proclaims financial leverage to be critically important in becoming rich.

Kiyosaki stresses what he calls "financial education" as a means to obtaining wealth. He says that life skills are often best learned through experience and that there are important lessons not taught in school. He says that formal education is primarily for those seeking to be employees or self-employed individuals, and that this is an "Industrial Age idea". And according to Kiyosaki, in order to obtain financial freedom, one must be either a business owner or an investor, generating passive income.

Kiyosaki speaks often of what he calls "The Cashflow Quadrant," a conceptual tool that aims to describe how all the money in the world is earned. Depicted in a diagram, this concept entails four groupings, split with two lines (one vertical and one horizontal). In each of the four groups there is a letter representing a way in which an individual may earn income. The letters are as follows.

E: Employee — Working for someone else S: Self-employed or Small business owner — Where a person owns his own job and is his own boss. B: Business owner — Where a person owns a "system" of making money, rather than a job to make money. I: Investor — Spending money in order to receive a larger payout in return. For those on the left side of the divide (E and S), Kiyosaki says that they may never obtain true wealth. Conversely, those on the right side of the divide (B and I) are supposedly following the only road to true wealth.