Kennon-Green & Co. Global Asset Management, Wealth Management, and Investment Advisory

We Bought Our “Forever” Piano – A Bösendorfer 230VC with Enspire Disklavier Pro and a Custom Interior Macassar Ebony Wood Inlay

I could hardly sleep Friday night because of excitement. It felt like Christmas as a kid, when all that joy, happiness, and anticipation are bundled together. Only much, much greater. Imagine you had been waiting on Christmas to arrive for more than thirty years.

Many of you watched me put off this purchase for decades as I prioritized investing over consumption, but it is now here: Aaron and I finally settled on our “forever” piano. We purchased a Bösendorfer 230VC model with the Enspire Disklavier Pro add-on and a custom-inlaid Macassar ebony wood around the soundboard. It is being manufactured near Vienna, Austria for us and should arrive in the next year.

Read more
Cash Flow Management - The Two Levers Philosophy by Joshua Kennon

Revisiting the Two Levers Philosophy of Cash Flow Management

One of the major lessons I’ve tried to teach is that building your net worth comes down to two levers: Cash in and cash out. That’s it. That is the entirety of the game when you peer past the distractions and gaze into the heart of the mathematical reality. From a financial perspective, every action you take for your career or business ultimately only matters in so much as it someday serves to exert force on one of those levers so that more cash is flowing in than is flowing out, leaving a surplus. It sounds so simple but when you see things through the focus of this particular lens, you can more quickly identify the actions that are likely to have an outsized effect, both for good or bad, on net worth.

Read more

One of the Most Important Lessons About Life and Making Money You Can Ever Learn

In 1927, Hugh Roy Cullen was approached by Jim West, a wealthy lumberman who had invested in projects with Cullen in the past.  On a Saturday, West called Cullen to his downtown Houston office, where he made the following offer: I’ve got $3,000,000 lying around.  And I’ve got the West Production Company, which don’t amount…

Read more
Net Worth and Income By Education Level

Household Income, Net Worth, and Unemployment Rates By Education Level

The most recent statistics on household income, net worth, and unemployment, sorted by education level, are really interesting.  Following our discussion about the splits that have emerged along geographic fault lines in the electoral body, I thought it would be important to highlight the economic differences and how enormous the income inequality is for the…

Read more
Change the Way You Think About Business Ownership and You Can Change Your Life - Header

Change the Way You Think About Business Ownership and You Can Change Your Life

Shortly after World War I, Raymond Poincaré, the Prime Minister of France, decided against partnering with Royal Dutch Shell to fund the energy needs of the French people.  One of his military commanders, Colonel Ernest Mercier, worked with 90 banks and businesses to establish a new oil company called French Petroleum Company (er, technically, Française des Pétroles Compagnie since they weren’t speaking English).  The name might sound prosaic but keep in mind this was the era of “General Electric” and “Standard Oil”.  The new undertaking began operations on March 28th, 1924. Today, that business is known as Total, S.A. and it is one of the six supermajor oil powers on the planet.

Read more
You Can Still Get Rich and Make Money In a Terrible Economy with a Miserable Stock Market

You Can Still Get Rich and Make Money In a Terrible Economy with a Miserable Stock Market

Towards the back of the most recent General Electric annual report is an interesting graph.  It shows what an investor would have experienced by putting $100 into three different investments: GE shares, the S&P 500, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average.  It assumes that dividends were reinvested in each respective investment when they were distributed.  How were you rewarded for six years of patient investing, assuming you added no fresh cash outside of the dividend reinvestment?  Take a look.

Read more

Kennon-Green & Co. Global Asset Management, Wealth Management, and Investment Advisory