Joshua Kennon's Personal Blog

Dec142011

Azrah Gestahl Joshua Kennon's Pure Skyrim Mage in Lord Ganon Enchanted Armor and Weapons

My Pure Mage Strategy Worked: Level 100 Conjuration, Level 100 Destruction, and Level 100 Enchantment

Video GamesBy Joshua Kennon December 14, 2011 13 Comments

I have done it! My champion in Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, Azrah Gestahl, has reached Level 100 Conjuration, Level 100 Destruction, and Level 100 Enchantment. My overall Level is 47, so I’m about to hit the soft cap of 51 that the gaming forums say is in place. I’m in the process of creating a set of ultimate weapons and armor, upgrading my old “Ganon’s” series to a new, “Lord Ganon’s” series en homage to the legendary villain of The Legend of Zelda series. This allowed me to create a situation that got the mathematical cost of all destruction spells, regardless of their power, to zero. Infinite power. Unlimited magic.

Dec132011

Cold Lamb Sandwiches and the Love Of Your Life

Finding the Love of Your Life (or Cold Lamb Sandwiches)

Movies, My LifeBy Joshua Kennon December 13, 2011 5 Comments

I’ve never understood those who believe love is a weakness or somehow mutually exclusive from financial and professional success. Mind you, I’m not talking about infatuation or being in love with the idea of love, endlessly pursuing the flavor of the week or looking for a never-ending stream of feel-good butterflies and chocolates, but actual…

Dec122011

Retirement Investing: A Married Couple Working for Wal-Mart Could Retire and Live Very Comfortably

Retirement InvestingBy Joshua Kennon December 12, 2011 12 Comments

Taking advantage of the right stock matching and retirement investing benefits, it would be possible to almost instantly double your money due to company matches if you and your spouse worked for a company such as Wal-Mart Stores.

Dec122011

Your Goal Is Not To Die With the Highest Net Worth Possible, It Is To Maximize The Utility of Your Family’s Money

Saving MoneyBy Joshua Kennon December 12, 2011 3 Comments

Saving money is important. Investing money is important. But if you don’t cash in some chips at some point in your life, all of your efforts will have been wasted because those claim checks on society will be taken by the government, spent by your heirs, or redistributed through fees and expenses by professionals such as attorneys left to sort out the inevitable lawsuits that result in the fight over your fortune after you’re gone.

Dec122011

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow Illustrates Why Nintendo Is In Trouble

Video GamesBy Joshua Kennon December 12, 2011 1 Comment

With all of the Elder Scrolls: Skyrim activity going on in every corner of my life, I began thinking about the various video game platforms and the video game industry as a whole. Going back to this summer when we were playing Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, which I bought on a whim, caused me to realize something: No one in my household, or in the households of my extended family, takes the Nintendo Wii seriously.

Dec112011

Charlie Munger at the Berkshire Hathaway Shareholder Meeting

Investing Advice from Charlie Munger

Portfolio ManagementBy Joshua Kennon December 11, 2011 3 Comments

Here are some words of wisdom I came across about portfolio management and building wealth from billionaire Charlie Munger. We’ve really made the money out of high-quality businesses. In some cases, we bought the whole business. And in some cases, we just bought a big block of stock. But when you analyze what happened, the…

Dec112011

Everything In Life Has An Opportunity Cost

EconomicsBy Joshua Kennon December 11, 2011 Leave a comment

In economics, opportunity cost is defined as the cost of not choosing the next, best alternative for your money or time. Everything in life has an opportunity cost. If you want to go to the movies with friends it means you can’t stay home and read a good book. If you want to spend cash on…

Dec112011

Group Well-Being Versus Individual Well-Being: Knowing Your Priorities

PhilosophyBy Joshua Kennon December 11, 2011 1 Comment

I want you to take a moment and put yourself in a scenario that will tell you a lot about your thought processes and inner priorities regarding individual well being versus group well being. You are married with three children. Your family is your highest priority. Your life is comfortable. You earn more than $100,000…

Dec112011

Mental Model: The Micawber Principle

Psychology, Saving MoneyBy Joshua Kennon December 11, 2011 1 Comment

Mental Model: The Micawber Principle In Charles Dickens’s novel, David Copperfield, published in 1850, the eternal optimist Wilkins Micawber was known for saying “something will turn up”. He was poor but lived in expectation of becoming rich, sometimes foolishly taking on debts due to the belief. We have Micawber to thank for one of the…

Dec112011

Making Money: Nothing Happens Until Something Is Sold

Making MoneyBy Joshua Kennon December 11, 2011 1 Comment

As Gene Bedell wisely reminds us, nothing happens until something is sold. That is one of the greatest business truths you can ever learn. Get it engraved on the back of a watch, keep it in your pocket inscribed on a small sheet of paper, or repeat it to yourself silently, but learn this principle so…

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.