New Millennium

The New Millennium functions as a warning horizon in Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It concentrates the book’s concern that rapid economic change, strained retirement systems, and weak financial education could leave millions dependent on their families or government, and turns that forecast into a call to teach children how money works before inherited habits become inherited hardship.

A future framed by uncertainty

The book looks toward the New Millennium by asking what will happen when millions of people need financial and medical assistance. The question is tied to the possible exhaustion of Medicare and Social Security and to the prospect that families or government will have to provide support. Rather than presenting the future as a distant abstraction, the author makes it a test of whether a nation can sustain people whose financial preparation has been left largely to parents, many of whom are themselves poor.

That concern also appears in the book’s opening discussion of retirement. Robert T. Kiyosaki and co-author Sharon Lechter worry that most Americans have little or nothing saved and question how dependable pension plans are. The possible burden of supporting 75 million baby boomers makes the future intergenerational: today’s children may be asked to finance a generation’s retirement even as their own education leaves them poorly equipped to manage money.

The educational inheritance

The book argues that money is taught at home rather than in school, so children can graduate with excellent grades yet retain a poor person’s financial programming. Schools concentrate on scholastic and professional skills, not financial ones; the resulting gap, in the book’s account, helps explain why highly educated bankers, doctors, and accountants may still struggle financially. The New Millennium intensifies the consequences of that omission: millions may need support, while the next generation has not been taught how to prepare for it.

Against that inheritance, the narrative presents financial education as a capacity that can be transmitted and expanded. Kiyosaki recalls choosing at age nine to learn about money from Rich Dad, despite Poor Dad’s college degrees, and describes three decades of lessons that continued until he was 39. Those lessons are presented as guideposts for readers and their children in a world of increasing change and uncertainty, not as a guarantee that uncertainty can be abolished.

Assets, dependence, and family responsibility

The book connects the future’s insecurity to present financial patterns. Families whose income depends chiefly on wages may see expenses rise with pay, accumulate liabilities, and remain dependent on an employer. The 1990s downsizing of businesses, the replacement of company pensions with 401(k) plans, and doubts about Social Security are offered as evidence that apparent stability can give way quickly. People who are already taxed heavily and burdened with debt may be unable to seize investment opportunities when they arise, because they must play safe.

Its proposed response is to build income-producing assets and keep liabilities and expenses low. Parents, in particular, are urged to teach children the difference between assets and liabilities and help them begin an asset column before leaving home, marrying, buying a house, or raising children. The book depicts the alternative as a chain of responsibilities: parents may reach the point when their last child leaves home without adequate retirement preparation, then face the illness of their own parents. Financial instruction is therefore framed as a family obligation across generations, not merely an individual technique for accumulating wealth.

Choice as the book’s answer

The closing appeal makes the New Millennium’s uncertainty a reason to act in the present. Readers are asked to use each dollar either foolishly, on liabilities, or to invest in their minds and learn to acquire assets. The choice is repeated as an everyday decision about whether to move toward poverty, middle-class dependence, or wealth, and parents are urged to share what they have learned with their children rather than assume someone else will prepare them.

This framing gives the New Millennium two roles: it is both a forecast of social strain and a measure of the urgency behind the book’s teaching project. Kiyosaki presents financial intelligence as necessary for survival and insists that money is an idea that can be developed through learning and practice. The proposed remedy is personal and intergenerational—start early, begin small, and pass on financial knowledge—while the scale of the problems named, including retirement insecurity and unequal financial preparation, remains national and collective.