This financial habit made his own accountants panic every time

Kiyosaki's bookkeepers, by his own account, have screamed at him more than once. The reason: whenever cash was tight, he paid himself first, before the tax office, before creditors, before anyone, and let the pressure from everyone else build instead.

This runs directly against the instinct most people are raised with, which is to pay every bill first and see what's left over for savings, usually nothing. Kiyosaki borrows the phrase pay yourself first from George Clason's book The Richest Man in Babylon, and points out that although millions of people can quote the line, almost none of them actually practice it, because practicing it means deliberately letting pressure build from tax collectors, credit card companies, and landlords rather than caving to it immediately.

His logic is about motivation rather than recklessness. If he pays his creditors first and himself last, there's rarely anything left, and no urgency is created to change that. But if he pays himself first and lets the bills wait, the discomfort of owing money to people who will call and complain becomes the very pressure that pushes him to find new income, start another venture, or move an investment, rather than dipping into savings to make the discomfort disappear. Who do you think will complain louder if I don't pay them, his rich dad once asked him, me, or my creditors? The answer, obviously, is the creditors, and rich dad used their complaints as fuel rather than treating them as emergencies to appease.

Kiyosaki is careful to separate this from irresponsibility. He still pays his bills, and he keeps his credit clean by avoiding heavy consumer debt in the first place, so the bills waiting are usually small and manageable rather than catastrophic. The rule isn't an excuse to dodge obligations forever. It's a deliberate exercise in self-discipline: refusing to let savings and investments be the first thing sacrificed whenever money gets tight, because once that becomes the easy release valve, it gets used every time, and the asset column never has the chance to grow. The discomfort of a bill collector's phone call, in his account, is doing exactly the job it's supposed to do, forcing a sharper mind rather than a softer one.

Before you pay a single bill this month, move a set amount, even a small one, into savings or an investment account first, and treat that transfer as non-negotiable rather than as whatever happens to be left over. When money feels tight and the temptation is to dip back into that same account to cover a bill, resist it, and instead let the pressure of the unpaid bill push you to find another way to cover it, whether that's a bit of extra work, a sale of something you don't need, or a faster solution than you'd otherwise have found. Keep your obligations modest enough that this pressure stays manageable rather than dangerous, and watch, over a few months, whether the discomfort actually sharpens your thinking instead of just frightening you.