About Joshua Kennon

For nearly a quarter-of-a-century, I have had an online presence writing about finance, investing, wealth accumulation, portfolio management, economics, politics, and more. I want people to achieve financial independence, and arrange their life in a way that brings them happiness and fulfillment.

It’s always odd and try to fit your life story into a few lines but here is the short version: My name is Joshua Kennon. I’m 41 years old as of the time I am updating this page in early 2024. My husband, Aaron, and I met and fell in love as teenagers. Neither of us ever even dated anyone else – we knew we were going to spend the rest of our lives together. After graduating from high school, we moved from the Midwest to the East Coast where we studied classical music and a wide range of liberal arts.

Later, we returned to the Kansas City area to be near family. During this period, which spanned nearly thirteen years and lasted from our early twenties into our mid-thirties, we started several Internet companies and spent much of our time semi-retired, managing our own wealth thanks to the financial independence those businesses helped us achieve. I also wrote a lot during those years. In fact, the odds are good that you’ve directly or indirectly encountered me many times without realizing it. For nearly 17 years, I was the Investing for Beginners Expert at what was then known as About.com. I am the co-author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Investing, 3rd Edition.

Due to requests from family and friends to manage their capital alongside our own wealth, Aaron and I decided to exit retirement and launch Kennon-Green & Co.^®, a fiduciary global asset management firm that specializes in helping affluent and high net worth individuals, families, and institutions invest their capital around the world. In 2018, as part of our journey to have kids through gestational surrogacy, and the spin-up of Kennon-Green & Co., we moved to Newport Beach, California.

For the six years that followed, we built our lives on the West Coast, including achieving our dream of becoming fathers. The firm expanded, began hiring employees, and, in early 2024, we relocated to New Albany, Ohio following a year-long search for our permanent home. The city, a suburb of Columbus, is destined to become one of, of not the, largest advanced microchip manufacturing locations in the world over the coming decade and boasts some of the most attractive demographics in the entirety of the United States as measured by median household income, educational attainment, and standard of living.

These days, we spend our time running and growing the firm, as we plan on it being the institution through our own family’s multi-generational capital is managed long after we’re gone. The experience, particularly meeting such incredible people, has been one of the most rewarding of our lives. It’s a rare thing to have a career that allows you to not only do what you love for a living, but to do it with people you admire, respect, and like. We feel like two of the most blessed guys in the world.

This personal blog is a place where I talk about some of the things that interest me – cooking, finance, entrepreneurship, politics, history, economics. I’m really proud of the community we’ve built, in no small part because the typical reader around here is exceptional. (One thing that brings me tremendous joy is the fact that many readers have been around since the early days; who remember content I was writing in 2001-2009, in particular, as those were both formative, and foundational, years for everything that was yet to come.) Please note that in preparation of the launch of the asset management business, and to better protect our family’s privacy, Aaron and I removed thousands of articles, posts, and comments from this blog, reducing it to a fraction of its former size. This means if you are looking for something that existed prior to us coming out of retirement, the odds are good it simply isn’t available anymore.