Roaring Twenties

The Roaring Twenties is the book’s shorthand for an exuberant boom that can make sudden wealth seem commonplace while concealing how easily it may be lost. Its recurrence links the prosperity of the 1920s to the narrator’s 1997 present, sharpening his argument that financial education—not income alone—is what helps people withstand economic change.

Historical Echo and Warning

The phrase first appears in a discussion of a 1923 gathering of prominent businessmen at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago. The narrator recounts that, twenty-five years later, several had died broke, one had gone insane, two had just been released from prison, and two had died by suicide. He suspects that the 1929 market crash and the Great Depression affected their fortunes, while acknowledging that he cannot say exactly what happened to them. The episode turns the apparent success of an elite group into a warning: prominence and wealth offered no guarantee of security through upheaval.

That historical account becomes a frame for the future as well as the past. The narrator predicts further booms and busts over the coming twenty-five years, comparable to the reversals faced by the men in 1923. Against that uncertainty, he argues that people should prepare by remaining flexible, open-minded, and willing to learn. Money without financial intelligence can disappear quickly; education, by contrast, can help people adapt as conditions change.

The 1997 Comparison

In 1997, the narrator sees many people becoming instant millionaires and calls the moment the Roaring Twenties again. The comparison conveys excitement, but it is also deliberately cautious: he is glad that people are getting richer, yet emphasizes that lasting wealth depends on how much they keep and how many generations they can preserve it for. The boom is therefore not presented as proof that newly acquired fortunes will endure.

A newspaper story gives that warning a human scale. A basketball player who had possessed millions a year earlier was, at twenty-nine, working at a car wash for minimum wage after saying that friends, an attorney, and an accountant had taken his money. He was fired after refusing to remove his championship ring while wiping cars, and appealed the termination, claiming hardship and discrimination. The ring, described as all he had left, makes the contrast between a public emblem of success and financial vulnerability especially stark.

Wealth, Risk, and Financial Behavior

The book also connects boom-time expectations to everyday responses to money. In Rich Dad’s lesson about the Rat Race, an escalating offer of hourly pay tempts the young narrator, first with the prospect of a bicycle and baseball glove and then with the fantasy of no longer being called poor. When the offer reaches five dollars an hour—more than many adults earned in 1956—the temptation gives way to calm. Rich Dad uses the boys’ changing response to explain how fear of having no money and desire for what money can buy can keep people working and spending in a repeating cycle. The boom’s promise of more money does not, by itself, free anyone from that pattern.

That lesson complements the adult narrator’s account of financial survival. He argues that wealth depends not simply on what a person earns but on what remains after earning, spending, and paying taxes. The Roaring Twenties thus names both a period of opportunity and a test of judgment: a rising fortune can be squandered if its owner lacks the knowledge to manage it.

A Market Story, Not a Guarantee

The phrase also sits within the book’s broader attention to how stories shape financial choices. Its comparison between 1920s exuberance and a new wave of millionaires helps readers interpret prosperity as a recurring condition rather than a permanent safeguard. Elsewhere, the narrator contrasts consumer behavior during sales with behavior in the stock market: shoppers stock up when household goods are discounted, yet investors may flee when a market decline makes shares cheaper. The point is not that a boom makes every investment sound, but that fear and excitement can pull people away from deliberate analysis.

The Roaring Twenties therefore functions as a compact historical analogy, not a promise that the present will repeat the past in every detail. It draws attention to the distance between getting rich and staying rich, and returns the reader to the book’s central prescription: build financial literacy before relying on money itself to solve financial problems.