Jon Kline

Backstory

Jon earned his Bachelor of Science in Finance from Carnegie Mellon University and spent fifteen years at JPMorgan Chase as an Executive Director covering institutional clients across cross-asset derivatives, including pensions, endowments, and insurance companies.

That experience is the intellectual origin of the Lakewood framework.

The world's largest institutional investors, pension funds managing the retirement security of millions of people, endowments funding universities and foundations in perpetuity, insurance companies guaranteeing obligations decades into the future, do not manage portfolios. They manage against liabilities. The first question they ask is not how to maximize return. It is how much capital is required, invested and compounding, to fund every obligation they have committed to meet. Everything above that number is available for long-term growth. This discipline is called Asset-Liability Management and it is the foundation of institutional portfolio construction.

Jon spent fifteen years working inside that framework, observing how the world's most sophisticated investors use it to make allocation and risk management decisions built to achieve the mission over market cycles. When he left JPMorgan, he asked a simple question: why don't individual families get the same framework?

The lifestyle number is the answer. It is the individual family's equivalent of an institutional liability: the capital required today, invested and compounding, to fund every dollar you intend to spend through age 95, net of taxes and inflation. The Lifestyle Protection sleeve funds it. The Risk Capacity sleeve compounds everything above it. The framework is the same one that governs the most sophisticated pools of capital in the world, applied with the precision and personalization that only a boutique firm can deliver.

Prior to founding Lakewood, Jon spent four years at Northeast Financial Group working in investment strategy, business development, and advisory services.

Jon lives in Northeast Pennsylvania with his wife Samantha and their twin boys, Max and Sid. He serves as President and Coach of his local youth football organization and volunteers with youth wrestling and baseball programs. Small town. Big impact.