Kiyosaki team splits up

The Arizona Republic reports that Sharon Lechter, co-author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and participant in the Rich Dad Co. joint venture with Robert Kiyosaki, is calling it quits and has filed a lawsuit in which she alleges "that her ex-business partner and his wife are enriching themselves, diverting assets and wasting money in a business that she claims to have helped build from scratch."

Lechter, a CPA in Paradise Valley, claims that she "refined and created" the original book, while Kiyosaki is merely the public face of the book. If so, that makes the book even more bogus than it already appears to be--it's already apparent that the "rich dad" of the title is a fictional character and that the book is filled with bad advice. Lechter needs to be careful how much credit she claims if she wants to have any credibility for financial acumen--but I suspect she will care more about the cash.

The Kiyosakis respond that Lechter was the editor rather than the author of the book and that she is exaggerating her contributions.

The Republic article includes some of the allegations from the Lechter suit, as well as some quotes from Kiyosaki critic John T. Reed. The most interesting point I saw was that the Kiyosakis have earned about $9 million from their Rich Dad entities, which is a lot less than I would have expected, at least if seminar income is included in that amount.

Rich Writer, Poor Thinker

Mr. Juggles at Long or Short Capital takes on Robert Kiyosaki:

Robert Kiyosaki is a maroon.
...

This is idiotic. In fact, this article is so terrible, I find it difficult to even know how to properly form an argument against it. It doesn’t even make sense.

But here is more evidence to unback-up the truck on Rich Dad Poor Dad guy.

...
While he is effectively mananaging his intelligence, and I applaud that, what exactly does this leave people to do with their money? He advocates against cash, stocks, bonds, saving money, buying things, the US, real estate, etc etc. What is left? Brine shrimp futures? Short or long positions in abstract ideas like Perf?

Go to Long or Short Capital to see the nonsense they're criticizing.

What's happened to The Simple Dollar?

The Simple Dollar blog is offline, and its author is looking for a way to get back online.

I've been reading Trent's The Simple Dollar blog since mid-December. It's a very well-written, professional-looking blog that gets a lot of traffic, but I was surprised to learn that he only started it about a month before I started reading it.

Today, I noticed a lot of Google searches for "The Simple Dollar" were hitting my blog, all coming to my post about Robert Kiyosaki that linked to Trent's blog. I clicked on the link to re-read his post, only to get a "Forbidden" message from his webserver. I contacted Trent to see if the problem was a legal issue, perhaps a threat from Kiyosaki, but it turns out his entire blog has been taken offline by Dreamhost, his webhosting provider.

It seems that today The Simple Dollar--already in the top 2800 at Technorati--got prominent links from both digg.com and reddit.com. This generated so much traffic to the shared server hosting the blog that Dreamhost disabled the account and denied access to the blog. Not only have they denied web access, they've denied Trent FTP access. He does have a backup from a few days ago, but is currently looking for a way to get back online with a dedicated server.

You can read his own account of his predicament at Metafilter.

I've offered a few suggestions for possible webhosting providers, but he doesn't think he can afford a dedicated server right now. That's in part because, despite his huge traffic, his blog has grown in popularity so fast that he hadn't yet acquired any major advertisers. He's been the victim of his own too-rapid success.

Are there any advertisers out there who would be willing to help finance the blog's return on a dedicated server with sufficient bandwidth to handle the traffic?

UPDATE (February 10, 2007): The Simple Dollar (or at least most of its content) is back!

The Simple Dollar on Robert Kiyosaki

Trent at The Simple Dollar writes about Phoenix's bogus financial wizard, Robert Kiyosaki, and gets a bunch of loonies appearing in the comments, including Amway advocates.

Trent gets it right, though probably doesn't even go quite far enough in condemning Kiyosaki. I recommend John T. Reed's overview of Kiyosaki, and Einzige's extensive series on John Burley (who has occasionally teamed up with Kiyosaki).

UPDATE (January 30, 2007): Mike Linksvayer has been prompted to comment on Kiyosaki, and his remarks are well worth reading.