Concept
Mind Your Own Business
Minding your own business, in Robert Kiyosaki's sense, means keeping your profession as the way you earn income while deliberately building an asset column you personally own, whose job is eventually to cover your living expenses.
Ask most people what their business is and they'll name their job: nurse, engineer, teacher. Kiyosaki calls that your profession, the work you trade time for. Your business is something else. It is the assets you own that keep paying whether you show up or not. That might be a rented apartment, a dividend-paying index fund, royalties, or a small operation that runs without you. His blunt observation is that many people spend whole careers minding other people's business. They work for the employer's profits, the bank's interest and the state's taxes, and almost nothing lands in their own column. The fix is not quitting your job. It is routing part of every paycheck into assets, and not turning each raise into a bigger liability. One number tracks progress: what share of your monthly expenses your assets already cover. Honest caveat: assets carry risk and take years, so start small enough to lose.
A real-life example
Dana, a hospital nurse, gets a $400 monthly raise. The old pattern would be a bigger car payment. Instead, $300 goes automatically into a broad index fund. She spends the next 90 days studying small duplex rentals before committing a cent. Two years later she owns about $7,500 in assets. Their dividends are trivial next to her rent. Still, it is the first line of her own business, and she is still a nurse.
How to use it
- 1Write your monthly expenses next to the monthly income your assets produce. That ratio is your business's scoreboard, so check it once a month.
- 2Move a fixed share of every paycheck, and most of every raise, into assets the day it arrives, before it can turn into a new installment payment.
- 3Pick one first asset small enough to lose. Test it for 90 days, and learn it alongside someone you also teach in return.