Robert Kiyosaki reveals why gold and silver beat your savings

If you feel like your savings account balance never quite keeps up with groceries, rent, and school fees, you are living in the gap Kiyosaki likes to talk about.

He has spent years warning that governments print “fake money” while inflation eats away at any cash you leave in the bank. He has framed savers as losers in a rigged game where your dollars buy less every year even if your account balance goes up.

In his recent social posts, he has gone a step further and told followers not to “save dollars” at all, as seen on X (formerly Twitter). He has repeatedly said the answer is to save gold, silver, and bitcoin instead, arguing that those assets cannot be debased in the same way as paper money.

When I look at reader questions, I see the same fear driving a lot of behavior. People feel like doing the “responsible” thing with cash has stopped working.

Kiyosaki taps into that frustration, then points you straight at metals.

What Kiyosaki actually claims about gold and silver

Kiyosaki does not pitch metals as a small diversifier. He pitches them as the core answer.

In September 2025, he said that if he had just $100, he would buy silver coins, and he predicted that $100 in silver could turn into $500 within a year, as a widely quoted X post shows. Moneywise, in a piece syndicated by Yahoo Finance, reported that he expects a 400% move in silver and called the metal “manipulated for years.”

He has also laid out bold price targets that sound more like lottery tickets than hedges. In late‑2025 coverage, He talked about silver going to $200 in 2026 while warning that “fake dollars will continue to lose purchasing power, as cited in a TheStreet’s coverage.

In a January 2026 roundup of his calls, Moneywise highlighted another post where he said silver could “surpass $100 in 2026… possibly reaching $200 an ounce,” and where he set a gold target of $27,000 an ounce based on projections he attributed to author and strategist Jim Rickards.

He has been just as aggressive about buying dips. He told followers a big crash in gold, silver, and bitcoin would be “good news” for him, because it would give him a chance to buy more of what he sees as real money at lower prices, according to the Economic Times.

When I read those quotes, what I hear is not a calm allocation plan. I hear a crisis script: fiat is doomed, metals are salvation, and there is a narrow window to get in before the explosion. That makes for compelling social content.

You still have to ask whether the numbers back it up.

What decades of data say about metals versus savings

You can’t answer Kiyosaki’s “gold and silver beat your savings” line without comparing long‑term returns for all three.

On gold, the research is fairly clear.

A World Gold Council paper on “Gold’s Long‑Term Expected Return” finds that gold has delivered long‑run real returns meaningfully above zero and much higher than the “gold just matches inflation” story you often hear. The Council’s GLTER model estimated that gold returned about 8% a year from 1971 to 2024 and projects an annual average around 5.2% over the next 15 years, versus assumed inflation near 2.5% and a short‑term Treasury yield around 2.9%.

In other words, gold has historically beaten sitting in cash or rolling short‑term Treasuries, and its expected return is still modeled above those “safe” assets.

The 2000–2024 window found that gold outpaced total returns from major U.S. equity indexes while also acting as a hedge in market crashes like 2008 and the COVID shock, according to the Proactive Advisor Magazine. The report also showed portfolios holding gold saw smaller peak‑to‑trough drawdowns than those holding only stocks and bonds.

Silver is more complicated.

A long‑term analysis by Auronum shows that from 1990 to 2024, silver gained roughly 467% in nominal terms and about 129% after inflation, but that its real return swung from more than 100% above inflation in 2011 to more than 30% below by 2015. Auronum highlighted that volatility as the price of silver’s upside.

A Markov‑switching study on gold and silver as inflation hedges, published on ScienceDirect in late‑2024, found that both metals can hedge inflation in certain states of the world, but that gold’s hedging performance is more stable while silver’s shifts sharply with changing regimes. The authors concluded that silver offers complementary protection but should not be treated as a simple, always‑on inflation hedge.

Now stack that against your savings account or a series of short‑term T‑bill rollovers.

Short‑term government paper often tracks the policy rate plus a small spread. When central banks keep rates below inflation, which they have at various points in the last 20 years, your real return on cash goes negative even though the nominal number in your account rises.

So mechanically, Kiyosaki is right about one thing: if you hold all of your long‑term money in cash in a system where inflation runs ahead of deposit rates, you are losing purchasing power. He is less right when he talks as if replacing all that cash with silver coins is an easy win. Silver’s own history is a reminder that you can trade steady erosion for wild swings if you are not careful.

How I would actually use gold and silver in a real plan

When I sit down with my own numbers, I don’t treat gold or silver as bank‑account replacements.

I treat them as specific tools in a broader kit.

Gold has earned a lot of attention lately. Spot prices pushed to fresh all‑time highs above roughly $4,800 per ounce in January 2026 after a record‑setting 2025, with some contracts trading above $4,900. Gold gained more than 50% in 2025 and is up sharply again to start 2026 as central banks, institutions, and retail investors look for a safe haven in a choppy macro environment, according to Trading Economics and recent coverage from CNBC.

Silver has been even wilder. Silver contracts climbed to record territory near $102 per ounce in January 2026, more than tripling over the last year and gaining roughly a third just in the past month, according to Trading Economics.

If you want to turn Kiyosaki’s message into something you can actually live with, a few practical rules help:

• Keep your emergency fund in cash or near‑cash
  You still want three to six months of expenses, where you can reach them without worrying about spot prices or bid‑ask spreads
• Use metals as a percentage, not a slogan
  For many small investors, that could mean something like 5%–15% of investable assets in precious metals, with more in gold and a clearly defined, smaller slice in silver
• Decide how “physical” you want to be
  Coins and bars remove fund and counterparty risk but create storage and security questions; ETFs and mining stocks are more convenient but behave more like financial assets than pure money

Those aren’t prescriptions, but they give you a framework.

They keep “gold and silver beat your savings” from turning into “gold and silver wrecked my timeline” because you mistook a hedge for a bank account.