Page 48 - Rich Dad's Increase Your Financial IQ: Get Smarter with Your Money

At the end of the evening, the lovely young lady shook my hand, kissed
me on the cheek, and sped off in a cab. I wanted more, but she just wanted

my money. The next morning, I began my drive from San Francisco to
Pensacola, where my flight training was about to begin, and in October of
1969 I reported to flight school. Two weeks later, I nearly died when I saw
what a $200-a-month paycheck looked like, after taxes.

Five years later, with one year spent in Vietnam, I was honorably
discharged from the Marine Corps. My first and immediate challenge was
financial IQ #1: making more money. I was twenty-seven years old and had
two great professions to fall back on, one as a ship’s officer, the second as a

pilot.
For a while, I considered returning to Standard Oil and asking for my job
back. I liked Standard Oil, and I liked San Francisco. I also liked the pay. I
would have started at about $60,000 a year, since Standard Oil counted my

time in the Marine Corps towards seniority.
My second option was to get a job as a pilot with the airlines. Most of
my fellow Marine pilots were being offered great jobs with a pretty good
starting pay of about $32,000 a year. Although the pay was not as good as

Standard Oil, being an airline pilot appealed to me. On top of that, whatever
the airlines would pay me had to be better than the $985 a month the
Marine Corps was paying me to be a pilot after five years of service.
Instead of returning to Standard Oil or flying for the airlines, however, I

took a job with the Xerox Corporation in downtown Honolulu. My starting
pay was $720 a month. Once again, I took a pay cut. My friends and family
thought the war had made me crazy.
Now, you may ask why I would take a job paying only $720 a month in

a very expensive city like Honolulu. The answer is found in the theme of
this book: increasing financial IQ. I took the job with Xerox not for the pay,
but to increase my financial intelligence—especially financial intelligence
#1: making more money. I’d decided that the best way for me to earn

money was as an entrepreneur, not an airline pilot or ship’s officer. I knew
that if I were to become an entrepreneur, I needed sales skills. There was
only one problem: I was terribly shy and dreaded rejection.
My problems were shyness and a lack of sales skills. Xerox was offering

professional sales training. They had the problem of needing salespeople. I
was looking to become a salesperson. So it was a great deal. We both solved