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

How We Made $100,000 a Year as Full-Time College Students

I found some of our old tax filings from last decade!  It turns out that around our college days, living together in the apartment complex next to the Quakerbridge Mall in Princeton, New Jersey, our combined household income was somewhere between $80,000 and $100,000 even though neither of us had full-time jobs and we were both students attending school on music scholarships.  (This is the same apartment that I showed you a few months ago.)  The difference between the two figures depends on whether you count unrealized capital gains as “income” since our net worth was increasing but it didn’t reflect in our taxes at the time.

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My Day In Pictures – Sunday, February 6th, 2011

This upcoming week is going to be busy. I have to finalize the accounting approval for last year before sending off all of the records to the firm that prepares our taxes, I have to drop off the finalized terms contract for the attorneys that are helping me explore launching my own financial vehicle, I have to write two or three new pieces of About.com content, I need to continue studying CSS because I love it, and I have to work on a lot of other stuff that you probably don’t really want to hear about – I’d like to get through the technology sector annual reports, finalize the list of stocks I plan to buy through my pension plan once the upcoming contribution is finalized, etc.

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How to Measure Your Wealth

Years ago, I vaguely remember hearing someone comment that it was interesting how differently we measure wealth today compared to British society at the end of the 19th century.  This made me realize that most people don’t even know there is a difference; that there are primarily two ways you can think about measuring your wealth and which you choose for your own household will influence how you behave, the capital structure you employ, and even how you think about risk.

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A Mental Exercise: What I’d Do If I Lost Everything

I started thinking about people who lose everything, or what Charlie Munger calls returning “to Go”, as in the Monopoly board. Once you are rich, your primary motivation shouldn’t be to get richer, it should be to avoid wipeout risk, or returning to go.  But as a training exercise, I decided to contemplate what I would do if I woke up tomorrow and the last ten years had been a dream.  What would my first course of action be to rebuild until I got my financial affairs in order?

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The True Source of the Unemployment Problem: In the Next 10 Years, 50% of Jobs Will Require Training Beyond High School Yet 25% of Students Aren’t Even Graduating from High School

The single most important line in the President’s State of the Union speech to Congress last night hasn’t gotten a lot of attention.  Here it is: Over the next ten years, nearly half of all new jobs will require education that goes beyond a high school degree. And yet, as many as a quarter of…

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