Joshua Kennon's Personal Blog

May62012

The Socialists Have Taken France

In the NewsBy Joshua Kennon May 6, 2012 31 Comments

I’ve been watching the French election. Hollande won. He has promised a 75% income tax on the rich and vows to, “re-negotiate a European treaty on trimming budgets to avoid more debt crises of the kind facing Greece.” Looks like we’re selling the French stocks in the retirement funds. I’m not dealing with this s**t. Forgive me the language. Life is too precious, and too hard, to deal with thugs who don’t understand human nature and the velocity of money. A fundamental rule of humanity is that people go where they feel secure and appreciated. I love the United States. If the United States took $75 out of every $100 I earned, do you think I would stay here? If I did, do you think I’d work anymore?

May42012

Business Strategy: The Best Weapon Is One Your Enemies Don’t Know Exists

Business StrategyBy Joshua Kennon May 4, 2012 6 Comments

One of the most useful business strategies, and life strategies, I know has to do with stealth projects, stealth accomplishments, and stealth resources. The strategy can be useful for games, in your own company, or in your own family. Showing you how it works might be the easiest way to explain it. Last night, Aaron…

May32012

The Thinker - Sdwelch1031 July 27 2010 Wikipedia Commons

Figure Out What You Want, Then Take Specific Actions to Achieve, Acquire, or Experience It

Business StrategyBy Joshua Kennon May 3, 2012 3 Comments

You have can almost anything you want in life. No one is going to give it to you. There is no calvary coming. Your parents, your friends, none of these people can live your life for you. Instead, you have to figure out 1.) What you want, and then 2.) Take specific, targeted actions to…

May22012

The Euthyphro Dilemma and the Nature of God, Goodness, Sin, and Evil

PhilosophyBy Joshua Kennon May 2, 2012 10 Comments

This morning, I woke up thinking about the Euthyphro dilemma. It was as if I had been in the middle of a debate, passionately arguing my case for the nature of goodness, when I was suddenly interrupted by the real world as a text message jolted me out of bed. I walked around, threw on…

Apr302012

Taxmageddon Massive Tax Rate Increases and Tax Increases in 2013

As Taxmageddon Approaches, How Should Investors Prepare for 43.4% Taxes on Dividends?

TaxesBy Joshua Kennon April 30, 2012 3 Comments

Last night, I published my monthly updates for the Investing for Beginners site at About.com, a division of The New York Times. One of the articles I wrote has to do with something called Taxmageddon. As the law stands now, in eight months, Americans will face one of the largest tax hikes in history, with…

Apr282012

My Dad’s Latest Project Is Restoring a Classic Ford Pickup Truck

Cars, My Day In PicturesBy Joshua Kennon April 28, 2012 3 Comments

My dad likes building stuff. It’s actually one of the coolest things about him. Whereas I design things on paper, then work with people to bring it into reality, he pictures it and then does it himself. Since I was a kid, my dad has wanted to restore an old Ford pickup truck. He…

Apr232012

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

Case Studies & Profiles, Dividends, Making MoneyBy Joshua Kennon April 23, 2012 17 Comments

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.

Apr222012

Oreo Pudding Layer Dessert White Chocolate and Milk Chocolate in Martini Glass

Five Minute Layered White and Milk Chocolate Oreo Pudding Dessert

Food and BeveragesBy Joshua Kennon April 22, 2012 4 Comments

Last night, we were in a hurry; were sponsoring a movie night and didn’t have much time to get dinner and dessert together. There would be no perfectly molded honey lemon bee hive cakes or unique custom icing crafted. Instead there would be delicious nachos and some sort of after dinner sweet. Whatever we did…

Apr202012

The Opportunity Cost of the Car You Drive Is One of the Biggest Financial Decisions You’ll Ever Make

Cars, Economics, My LifeBy Joshua Kennon April 20, 2012 21 Comments

The great thing about making decisions in life through the lens of decision trees and opportunity cost is that it allows you to focus on what you actually want. You tend to protect yourself against giving up what you really want for what you want right now. Everything in life has an opportunity cost. It doesn’t…

Apr192012

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

Case Studies & Profiles, Making MoneyBy Joshua Kennon April 19, 2012 Leave a comment

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.

It’s always odd to try and fit your life story into a few lines but here is the short version: My name is Joshua Kennon. I’m 36 years old. 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.

These days, we spend our time running and growing the firm, as we plan on it being the institution through which we pass on our own family’s wealth to our future children and grandchildren. 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. 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.