We Continue to Put Down Roots, Both Deep and Wide, in New Albany
After the massive life changes that have played out over the past few years, not only our own family and firm but the broader world, 2024 has been a blessing. I shared with you back in March that Aaron and I had been quietly buying real estate in and an around New Albany, Ohio; one of the fastest growing, wealthiest areas in the United States. This has given a sense of permanence to our relocation and made us feel firmly settled. That project has continued apace as we continue to put down roots, both deep and wide, in the community.
Our primary house – a brick Georgian with classical architecture sitting on the golf course of the New Albany Country Club – feels like home. It has the traditional spirit of the best of America; the sort of idyllic place where we wanted our kids to grow up as food is made in the kitchen and the piano is playing from the living room. The neighbors are amazing and welcoming, the neighborhood looks like something out of a storybook, and it’s slowly transforming into how we want it to be. There is still a lot of work to do – I think I mentioned my best guess is it would take 36 months or so to personalize it how we envision – but things are coming along nicely. Our front door is decorated for autumn, the leaves are changing, the kids helped me bake an apple pie the other day … it feels like our life in Missouri, only better, in so many ways.
The second house we bought for my in-laws to live in as they grow older has also been a huge blessing. It’s surrounded by beautiful trees and landscaping, is only minutes away, a short distance to parks, and the kids love it. This is the home they will associate with grandma and grandpa as they grow up. It feels very similar, only larger and even newer, than our house in Missouri so it felt so right the moment we walked into it.
I’m trying to convince my parents and grandma Ruby to live nearby, too. I think I have a good chance. My parents are younger and not, yet, retired, but they need to start planning for their golden years. We both loved growing up surrounded by our own grandparents and want the same for the Kennon-Green kids.
The newest development: We are under contract to purchase a commercial property! We are so, so happy about it! We’ve been working from our home in New Albany for almost a year now and I cannot wait for it to have its own facility. It’s minutes away. At 4,200+ square feet, provides more than double the space we had in Newport Beach. It also makes me feel much better to own the real estate, spending less than we were on rent and piling up yet another reserve of equity. (Interestingly, we had given up hope finding something that would work for us in the area and were going to lease in an existing commercial building until we decided to construct something. The opposing counsel for the landlord on the lease deal took awhile to get responses back to our attorney. It was during those delays that this fell into our laps, arriving completely out of the blue.) Commercial property is definitely more complicated than residential property – reading about telecom easements and property declarations wasn’t on my bingo card a few months ago – but the process has been so much easier thanks to the seller being amazing. We are so grateful for everything she’s done to get the deal closed, which we hope is in the very near future. So much of the process is waiting on others, such as the title company, to do their thing.
The best part of all of this is I am only 42 years old. True, the last few years have felt like a lifetime between parenthood, the pandemic, and the firm’s growth, but objectively, if I am fortunate and have ordinary life expectancy, I’m at the really fun part of the game. Do you know what I can do from this base over 40+ years? I feel giddy just thinking about it.
The next big decision is what every parent faces: When to have more kids. (There is no official schedule, yet, for when we start the next round of gestational surrogacy journeys for babies three and four, but we’d like to do it sooner rather than later so the kids are all around the same age and get to grow up together. Based on normal life expectancy, our next children will likely get to know all four of their grandparents and great grandma Ruby, as well, which is important to us. We want them to carry those memories with them for the rest of their lives.) To that end, we’ve started moving the puzzle pieces, the first of which was the car. We decided to get rid of the 2021 Lincoln Aviator Black Label SUV. It was, and is, a great vehicle, especially during the pandemic. We love the hybrid feature. However, it isn’t big enough. We opted to replace it with a 2024 Cadillac Escalade Platinum Sports model. It has so much more space in the third row that we could either have additional car seats or grandma and grandpa could go with us to a restaurant.
As you can probably guess, it bothered me a bit because I prefer to drive cars for decades to get the cost per use down to nothing given my distaste for depreciating assets. This was a case where parenthood changed the utility calculation and our needs outweighed my inner Scrooge McDuck. At least in part. If I’m being totally transparent, there was still a Scrooge-like element to the deal. We got a five-figure discount on the Cadillac because we agreed to buy one of the brand new models the dealership had temporary provided to the professional tennis players at the Cincinnati Open tournament a few days prior. That meant there were only a few colors from which we could choose on those specific units. Fortunately, there was a beautiful white one that closely matched our 2016 Jaguar XJL Portfolio Edition so now they look as if we purposely designed them this way when, really, it was all about those sweet, sweet discounts. Seven or eight years later and that Jaguar remains almost perfect. No car has ever come close to the value/benefit calculation.
It’s almost unfathomable to me how much parenthood influenced everything about my life. I live in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, drive a large SUV, joined a country club so the kids could have lots of activities, and made real estate choices based upon school district. My evenings are spent reading books, building tower blocks, and watching Disney movies. In the old days, it would have been a cold, calculated mathematical question meant to optimize my compounding outcomes and I’d have spent a couple of hours watching Korean dramas or playing Civilization. Yet, I wouldn’t change it for the world.
