Joshua Kennon's Personal Blog

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.

Apr182012

Why the Euro Is Doomed to Fail and Greece Suffer Austerity

Economics, In the NewsBy Joshua Kennon April 18, 2012 5 Comments

I am going to give you a brief economics lesson in a few short minutes. Economists like to make things hard but for those of you wanting to know why Greece, and the Euro, continues to be such a problem for the world, here is a breakdown. It isn’t nearly as difficult as you might…

Apr162012

Playing Good Defense Is Just as Important When Building Wealth

Saving MoneyBy Joshua Kennon April 16, 2012 3 Comments

On this site, we talk a lot about how to play offense in the game of building wealth – investing in assets that generate cash, increasing your skill set so you can charge a higher price for your time, starting or acquiring businesses that throw off profits – but today I want to talk about an…

Apr152012

You Might Want to Avoid Investing in Hard Businesses Under Most Circumstances

The World Is Full of Hard Businesses. You Should Probably Avoid Investing In Them.

Business StrategyBy Joshua Kennon April 15, 2012 7 Comments

The world is full of hard businesses like steel mills. As a general rule, it is best to avoid them if you want to make a lot of money given that they tend to involve more risk due to lower returns on capital, weaker balance sheets, higher indebtedness, and a host of other factors.

Apr92012

The Midwest Airlines Chocolate Chip Cookie Is Officially Dead

TravelBy Joshua Kennon April 9, 2012 3 Comments

Shortly after high school and during college, I found myself having to travel often. A family member who had experienced almost every airline, large and small, traveling as part of a successful medical career, recommended a small regional carrier called Midwest Airlines. Not only did they offer fewer passengers per flight by having two leather…

Apr32012

Video Games May Seem More Expensive But They Aren’t – It’s All In Your Head

Economics, Video GamesBy Joshua Kennon April 3, 2012 8 Comments

I have been hearing a lot of grumbling lately from friends and fellow gamers about the cost of video games. The economist in me cringes when an otherwise rational person jumps into a diatribe on the state of video game pricing and the various console wars because it reminds me of those people who insist that gas is at an all-time high, even when the inflation-adjusted cost of traveling one mile is less than it was in the 1950s. Listening to it makes me realize how thoroughly our education system has failed at producing rational, informed citizens capable of competing in the information age where knowledge is power.

Mar192012

How Many People Earn More than $1,000,000 Per Year In the United States?

Economics, Mail BagBy Joshua Kennon March 19, 2012 13 Comments

How Many People Earn More than $1,000,000 Per Year In the United States? This mail bag question deals with a sub-specialty of the top 1%; those earning more than $1,000,000 per year, or $83,333 per month, often in the form of dividends, interest, and rents. How many people earn more than $1 million a year…

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.