Robert and Mike continue working without pay

Robert and Mike continue working without pay as part of Rich Dad’s attempt to teach them how money can govern behavior. What begins as the loss of ten cents an hour becomes a test of whether they will react to financial temptation or pause, examine their feelings, and learn to make money work for them.

The Change in the Arrangement

After Robert asks for a raise, Rich Dad tells him that the lesson will continue under a new arrangement: the boys will work the same three hours every Saturday, but receive nothing. Mike is already doing unpaid work, dusting and stacking canned goods, and Robert is told to return to the store and join him. Rich Dad presents the removal of wages not as an end to the lesson but as its next stage: Robert has said he wants to learn not to work for money, so Rich Dad makes the immediate reward disappear.

Robert objects that the arrangement is unfair and insists that Rich Dad should pay something. Rich Dad makes the alternative explicit: Robert can return to the original ten-cent hourly wage, complain that the pay is inadequate, quit, and seek another job—or use his mind to understand the opportunity. He taps Robert on the head and sends him back to work, framing thought rather than wages as the resource the boys must learn to use.

Three Saturdays Without Pay

For three more weeks, Robert and Mike work three hours every Saturday without compensation. Robert does not tell Poor Dad, believing that his father would not understand a lesson Robert himself has not yet grasped. The work itself does not trouble him, and the routine becomes easier; what weighs on him is missing baseball games and being unable to buy comic books.

The missed games and comics make the cost of the arrangement concrete. The boys are not simply considering an abstract theory about wages: they give up activities and purchases that matter to them. Their continued attendance shows that they remain inside Rich Dad’s lesson despite the absence of immediate pay, but their frustration also leaves them susceptible to the prospect of earning more.

The Test of Temptation

On the third Saturday, Rich Dad visits the store around noon, checks how things are going, buys ice-cream bars, and takes the boys across the street to a grassy field and a picnic table. He asks whether they have learned anything. They shrug and say, in effect, that they have not. Instead of explaining the lesson directly, he tests what they want by offering progressively higher wages: twenty-five cents an hour, one dollar, two dollars, and finally five dollars.

Robert feels the appeal of the offers. At two dollars an hour, he imagines a new bicycle and baseball glove, candy, toys, and the approval of friends who might no longer call him poor. But he does not accept. When Rich Dad reaches five dollars—more than many adults earned in 1956—the offer becomes so extreme that its attraction breaks. Robert and Mike look at one another, and the urgency of wanting the money gives way to calm and certainty. The test changes the boys’ understanding of the unpaid work: they have experienced how quickly desire can make a wage seem decisive, and how questioning that impulse can interrupt its hold.

The Lesson Behind the Unpaid Work

Rich Dad interprets the boys’ temptation as a version of the cycle that drives people to work, collect paychecks, and spend more as their income rises. Fear of having no money pushes people to work; desire for what money can buy then shapes their spending. He calls the repeated pattern the Rat Race and argues that a larger paycheck alone does not free a person from it. Removing wages forces Robert and Mike to confront what they feel rather than treating pay as the automatic answer.

The lesson also connects the boys’ experience to Rich Dad’s criticism of conventional financial education. Schools teach professional and scholastic skills, he argues, but do not teach people how to handle money or the fear and desire attached to it. His purpose is not merely to make the boys wealthy: without learning to manage those emotions, he warns, even a rich person can remain a highly paid slave. The unpaid Saturdays therefore serve as practical training in financial judgment, not simply as work performed for no compensation.

A Lesson Carried Forward

Robert later describes the episode as one of the examples that widened his vision and stayed with him. The boys’ response to the escalating offers becomes the basis for Rich Dad’s advice to delay emotional reactions and think for the long term. That principle reappears in the book’s emphasis on financial literacy, asset-building, and choices made before immediate wants dictate what money is for.

The episode also sits within a broader argument about how financial habits pass between generations. Robert contrasts Rich Dad’s instruction with Poor Dad’s emphasis on schooling and employment, and later argues that money is learned at home rather than in school. In that context, the Saturdays without pay are an unconventional form of education: Rich Dad uses the boys’ own lost time, desired purchases, and reaction to rising wages to expose the emotional pattern he wants them to recognize.