1. Get a financial advisor - It is important to take note in the background of financial advisor, observe which cash flow quadrant they are from. Rich dad’s cashflow quadrant defines E-S-B-I as in E-Employee, S-Self employed, B-Business, and I-Investor. Most of the financial advisors are from the cash flow quadrants of S and E, meaning they are either self-employed or working for a financial institution such as bank or insurance company. If you want to be a successful business owner, probably this financial advisor who comes from S or E  is not the best to give you advise. However if you want to excel as an employee, the mentioned first two might just be fine to get you started.
2. Pick up a few books – When picking up books, it is also important to note on the background of the author. It is important that we take advice only from the person who has already been successful in financial life. Robert Kiyosaki and Adam Khoo are best example authors that write good books about achieving financial freedom. Adam Khoo is a self-made millionaire who made his first million at the age of 26 years old. One of his popular books is Secret of The Self Made Millionaire. While Robert Kiyosaki is a successful business owner and real estate investor, and his best selling book around the world is the famous Rich Dad Poor Dad and Cashflow Quadrants.
3. Play the Rich dad’s Cashflow 101 Game – This game is available in both PC version and board game.  The game basically simulates peoples role in financial life.  The goal of the game is to escape from rat race – as in escaping the typical middle class life of working for money in order to pay off debts. Playing this game you will learn some basic on reading income statement, expense, and balance sheet. Best thing about this game is that it simplifies so much that it is easy for beginner to understand as well, however in order to win the game, it takes a bit of financial literacy, which one will learn in the process of game play.
4. Making Mistakes – Schools punish students for making mistake, yet the best way to learn is by making mistake. The more mistakes you make, the wiser you are. People who never make mistake are not that they are smarter, it is because they never attempt to succeed. So try taking action now, make your own mistakes and learn from it. Financial literacy learnt through experiences is priceless lessons one could ever learn in life.
5. Join Seminar – Probably this is the highest priced investment in pursuing of financial education but could well worth the investment in long run. One good thing about attending a seminar is that most of them will get you involved in many useful training and interaction sessions. You don’t get this by listening to coaching audio and books. Besides, during seminar you get to know others who also have a same passion and interest as you. You can hardly find people who are as interested in money as you from the office.
6. Online articles – Good thing about online article is that they are all free, all you need is to spend a bit time looking for good information. Web site like Ezinearticles.com and articlebase.com have abundant of well written articles focus on financial topics.  However, be warned that most articles might just be well written but not technically proven, so just treat it like a reference and try applying it (with no cost involved of course) and see if it works in real life.

I played cashflow 101 game for second time today. This time much better, not many mistakes made except a few times i over-leveraged a little in buying rental properties that caused increase in expenses in paying bank loan, but turned out okay since my net cashflow was still in positive zone although decreased a little.

All these while i have been focusing on building up passive income, and because of bank loan i took up to buy those rental properties, my expense also increased. So what i did next was to concentrate in paying back debts to reduce monthly expense.

Once monthly expense is reduced, it became much easier to accumulate cash because with reduced expense, my net cashflow increases significantly. Then not only i have income from job, i also have passive income. I just have to continue adding passive income and i would be promoted to the fast track.

There are the few lessons i learnt from cashflow 101 game:

1 – It is much easier to gain capital appreciation than getting positive cash flow from the asset. In real life, you just need to leave your house for as long as possible and very likely the house price will appreciate (Under ideal condition). But during this period, you might not get a positive cash flow from your property. Consider having your condominium rental income covering both monthly installment + maintenance fee + other miscellaneous cost is actually quite hard to achieve. There is a saying; profit is made when purchase instead of sales, while buying a rental property and hope that the rental price will go up is a gamble.

2 – If you haven’t found a good opportunity, simply don’t do anything. If you get hasty, you might run into trouble – something like what i did in previous game where i take on a huge loan and end up in negative cash flow and then bankrupted in the end. Recently the price of condominium become crazy and overprice (in my opinion), a pre-developed unit in Puchong area can actually sell for RM320K and above. To me, that won’t provide me a positive rental income because i simply don’t believe people are willing to pay that much for rental per month, talking about RM1800 per month (to cover installment and maintenance fee, and other miscellaneous cost). If you think it is not a good deal, simply don’t do anything. Probably some where there are hidden gem waiting for you. You just have to keep looking until you think that you are comfortable with the deal.

3 – Some might ask; how am i able to get so many loans given i have already own a property on mortgage? I have experience on this and i personally get the pre-approval from the banker before. As long as your existing rental property provide you positive rental income, they will consider your loan application and you are in business.

4 – Getting out of the rat race is actually not a race between you and others, but you and yourself. When i was playing the game, i keep looking at other people passive income and thought again and again; are they getting out soon? i must not lose out to them. Getting out of the rat race is a game you compete with yourself. Just do the right thing, be patience and look for good opportunities, accumulate wealth and passive income whenever you are able to. Sooner or later you will be able to escape from the rat race.

5 – It is so much easy to accumulate wealth for investment when you are free up from big expenses. Things like credit card, new plasma TV installment, gold and jewelry, etc. If you are not doing anything with your money, don’t let it sit there and depreciate. Pay back those debts. If you are not investing with return higher than credit card interest rate, your money will still fly away slowly.

I have a chance to try on Cashflow 101 board game today. The concept of the game is easy and straight forward - to make enough passive income streams to cover the expense then you will proceed on the fast track and thus winning the game. To make passive income stream, you could choose to invest on rental properties or buy existing money making business, low-yield stock dividend, etc.

The rule may sound easy, the game is created in a way that you have randomized chance to run into all kind of troubles and good opportunities, just like in real life. If you hit on opportunity it could be either good or those not too good one, the choice is yours to make whether to take the opportunity.

There are times when you need to evaluate the cost of opportunity such as trading off existing cashflow for capital appreciation and reinvest it into a higher cashflow investment. If that is not done properly, your net cash flow might end up status quo or going south. There was once during the game play i got hasty, and half I was also in an experimental mood, I took on an investment opportunity to own a business that i couldn’t afford without borrow a huge bank loan plus mortgage. Even though my passive income increases tremendously after that, I suffered from over expense from paying the bank loan and miscellaneous expenses like children expense. My total income was not enough to cover total monthly expenses and it went negative subsequently. I have to declare bankruptcy.

Once recovered from bankruptcy it became extremely difficult to accumulate wealth, my net cash flow became so little because I sold nearly all my rental income assets to pay off debt. I accumulate so little month over the month. I couldn’t invest or buy share and yet i have to pay back leftover debts little by little. Worse still, several times i hit the Doodad (Events where spending in unnecessary stuffs is unavoidable; such as big plasma tv, expensive dinner, etc) and have to use my credit card. By using the credit card it increased my monthly expense. All these scenarios precisely tell you; when you have no money, when you are in deep debt and endless troubles, life can become worse. It won’t care who you are or how hard you work. That round i ended out of the game.

In real life, that could be a real disaster – from one mistake it becomes chain reacting to other bigger problems down the road.