Overall waste of time

Posted by Dana on 2nd Sep 2009

Wealth Expo at Learning Annex in LA


I attended the Wealth Expo at the Learning Annex in LA about 5 years ago after seeing Robert Kiyosaki on PBS (whom I still very much admire, and still give credit to his book Rich Dad, Poor Dad for changing my financial life.) The tickets for the expo were around $125 each, and the seminars took up a full weekend--the line started forming at 4:45am each day, and was easily around the building by 6 am! For those of you who haven't been to the learning annex in LA, it's stadium sized--holds umpteen thousands of people. There is a certain energy when you are in a building that size full of people interested in the same information you are. All abuzz with excitement, we walked through the doors and were handed course schedules. There were courses scheduled every 45 minutes for the duration of the day (about a full 8 hours) on just about every topic pertaining to real estate investing and stocks.

Each day started and ended with about an hour long talk by someone highly successful, Donald Trump, Robert Kiyasaki and Tony Robbins were the three that I really remember. ...So after the first guest speaker of the day, we all broke up and attended the classes that we found most interesting--the excitement quickly turned to disappointment after the first "course" ended. All they were were thinly veiled mini in-person informercials for products that sold or $995- $4995. The whole 45-90 minutes was just a sales pitch for their product; no real info was actually given. The information given out during the seminars was all an overview--and every single seminar had the presenters calling us "folks" (which I have since learned, that loosely translated means "I am going to ask for money here shortly"), some sob story (one guy told about how he was living in an abandoned building with a dog he couldn't afford to keep--that he eventually sold for money to get food...of course he even had pics of the dog and this great story how he then bought an apartment building 30 days later and was soon afterwards able to get his dog back.), and a smattering of facts that made whatever they were selling look so easy. I'm not proud to say, but I ended up buying some material on basic real estate investing from Russ Whitney's son for the bargain price of $995. ...I will write about what a scam/joke that material was in a review directly related to The Wealth Academy (the Russ Whitney group.)

So overall, the big name speakers were interesting, and the seminars were just infomercials given under the guise of education. If you do go to one of these events, at the very least be aware that there is no real info to be learned--and that you will be sold to for 8 hours a day.