When it all started..

It all starts on my birthday. My wife knowing my knack for reading books bought me a book by Robert Kiyosaki - Rich Dad Poor Dad. I actually finished reading the book within a week and it got me all interested to know much more on the technics to accumulate wealth. The basic understanding is that the most prized and ultimate step to be good investor is to be well informed and knowledgable in the business of making wealth. And this is through investing in your ownself by learning, reading books and attending seminars that can improve and increase your knowledge in that area.

The four quadrants of Employee, Business, Sole-proprietor and Investor all makes sense. Now, we start thinking of getting out of the Employee quadrant.

Being an Employee means you are doing all the hardwork and you can only get just a portion of what you've worked for as opposed to be the owner of the business. As owner of business your income will be like much more if you worked hard and if your business is good you can just employ ppl to work much harder where you can have the time to relax. Meaning you can leverage your time when you have employees working for you. However, when you do start your own business you'll know that this is not the case. You still have to do all the hardwork before you can reap all the success. Even then, once you are successful you've got to maintain it and this is the hardest part! You then got to diversify and all other strategies to be implemented to sustain your business. This is the time when you go to the Investor quadrant to invest in other businesses or ventures.

And all these knowledge about managing your personal finance are not taught in your school, colleges, universities and etc. All these things need to be learned. We heard about ppl in well to do position in their companies faced financial problems and all these is due to the fact that they are not managing their financial standing or their wealth properly. You wonder why with all the high pay, high salary they still living on the edge. It is actually because bad and poor financial management. They can have all the best position in the companies with high salaries but if they are poor in financial management all the money in the world will not be enough. This books tell you that you don't have to worry much about how you do in your school, college or university as what is more important is how you survive the real world. The world where only the fittest survives. It is not to say that education is not important, in Islam education is very important but once you've learned about it, you've got to do it or practice what you've learned and you've got to spread what you've learned. Knowledge without practicing it is like a tree that can't bear any fruits.

However, due to local regulations and others, much of the information contained in Rich Dad and Poor Dad book could not be practised here. We however can try to find ways to work around it and filter the parts where it does not follow our syariah rules.

My next entry will also be about how I update myself accordingly via books and my first participation in a seminar.