Let’s rewind the clock to January 2022, three months after I’d quit my City of London banking day job.

Little did I know that two years later I’d be dusting off my briefcase and sauntering back into the hallowed banking halls, but we’ll put that to one side for the moment. 

While Covid raged and I caught up on 10 years of lousy sleep, I took the opportunity to stock the bookshelves at Casa Grundy with a few classic tomes.

One of those tomes was Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

It’s a personal finance book written through the lens of two of Robert’s dads. Rich Dad is Robert’s best friend’s father and an entrepreneur who believes in building assets, thinking for himself and making your money work for you. Poor Dad is his well-educated father who believes in job security, climbing the ladder and working hard for your money. And the whole book plays out as a parable built around these two dads.

It might sound like a book for entrepreneurs or wannabe entrepreneurs. But to my mind it’s just as valuable for anyone holding down a full time job with no plans to do anything different.

And that’s because you can have the best of both worlds and adopt the Rich Dad approach IN your day job.

Why would you want to do this?

Simple.

Because you don’t fancy quitting your job tomorrow to become the next Rich-Dad Branson but you’d still like your job to work for you as much as you work for it (or even more if you’re feeling greedy).

Corporate life is so dominated by people working their socks off that they never stop to ask how to squeeze all the juice from their lemon of a job in the same way Rich Dad squeezes all the juice from his financial assets.

But your job can work for you just as much as any financial asset can.

This is what I call the Rich Grad, Poor Grad approach.

It’s the difference between the graduates who roll out of uni into their first job with the mindset “let’s make my job work for me” vs the graduates who pitch up on day 1 thinking “I’ll earn my stripes, climb the ladder and fingers crossed I enjoy the view at the top”. 

I mean, you can do the latter if you want. But then you’re not a Rich Dad OR a Rich Grad.

Mind you, it took me a while to figure this out. I certainly wasn’t a fresh-faced, wide-eyed graduate when I realised “oooh, I can actually USE my job in various sneaky ways while it's busy using me too”. I wrote about some of these in yesterday's email.

But it doesn’t matter if you’re just starting out in gainful employment or if you’re just about to don your retirement slippers. 

You can start using your job today, right now.

If I’ve piqued your curiosity at all, here’s where it all began:

Rich Grad, Poor Grad

To fulfilment,

Tom