Hello, everybody. It's Sam and Cindy from Financial Samurai. And in this episode, we want to relive the pandemic days, because the pandemic was really an experience in hedging our lives. On May 11 2023, the federal government lifted the public health emergency for COVID-19. So officially, the pandemic is over, even though supposedly something like 40,000 people have died year to date due to COVID-19.

But life must go on. And in this episode, I just wanted to recap what life was like in 2020, what we did during the pandemic, and what we should have done. So, Cindy, what are your thoughts now that the pandemic is officially declared over? I'm so happy. And it's been a long way coming.

I feel like I was starting to get a lot more comfortable in the last year. But especially this year, it's people, I think in San Francisco as well, in general are just a lot more comfortable that things have, you know, we've moved on, we were not getting sick anymore.

And we're living our lives to the fullest again. Yeah, we actually went to several packed events. And we didn't have kind of any worry, nobody wore masks anymore. And it just it just seems surreal, though, because I think we forget what life was like, maybe in 2020. And 2021, if we don't really drill down to the details.

I remember in early 2020, as soon after the lockdowns, the public parks were closed in San Francisco. And I was thinking to myself, what do you mean the public parks, the playgrounds are closed, it's outdoor space. Come on now. And so what happened the first two weeks was, we ended up doing a lot of chalk drawings on the cement in our backyard.

And I still have this video, this really heartwarming, but sad video of our son, walking up a chalk drawing ladder and then scooting his butt down the chalk drawing slide. And that was kind of the moment where I thought to myself, you know what, screw the parks being closed.

We're gonna go to the damn park. Yeah, it was very happy sad to see that. I mean, super happy sad. I was like, we know it was happy because we try to make do with what we had. And he was smiling. And he was smiling. And he was like, Oh, this is how you slide if pretend slide, but then it made me sad and also angry that something like this could happen that you know, our freedom, our freedom was restricted.

And for someone who has been free since 2012, and you since 2015, I was I was like, there, there's no way you're gonna keep me down. Yeah, and keep our children down. So let's discuss some of the things that we did do during the 2020 and 2021 period, to try to hedge against our life because one of the reasons why I decided to leave work behind at 34 was to hedge against an early death.

I figured if I left at 34, and I lived until 60, and age 60 was the age that I thought, okay, just give me until age 60. And then I'll live a happy life. And I thought about that when I was in my 20s. Then I could live, you know, like 2526 years of the good life, not having maximum amount of money because I'm not working more, but a life full of freedom.

And then if I passed away, you know, that would suck. But at least I would minimize my regret. There were just too many close calls that happened in my life, where I wasn't constantly aware of my mortality. And so when the pandemic hit, I immediately thought to myself, okay, if we live through this pandemic, which we probably would have, but then we kept our lives like, like we were living in prison, we would probably really get pissed off about this time period.

And then so we had to do something to make sure that we didn't look back with regret. So let's talk about several positives. The first positive is we had our daughter in December 2019. We had no idea what was coming. We had no idea it was it was serendipitous.

We plan to stay at home for at least two years after she was born anyway. And so in retrospect, how was raising a baby like during the pandemic for you? Initially, it wasn't it wasn't that different. I mean, we were really lucky that we didn't have to deal with any of the hospital lockdowns because she was born in December.

Oh, yeah, and I could actually be there for the yeah, and you were able to be there. We didn't have any of stress around the birth. So we were lucky that way. I think we were just more we weren't so worried about leaving the house. We were worried about getting through each night, you know, is she gonna sleep?

So we kept our minds off of a lot of the, you know, the lockdown part because we were busy, you know, being parents being parents. Yeah. You know, when you first have a baby, it's all about care and making sure they survive. Yeah, things like sudden infant death syndrome and choking on something and all that is already really heightened.

And so for me, the pandemic just kind of heightened that risk of death even further. Right? We had to make sure that she especially was protected because she had the weakest immune system in the whole family. Basically, so that was something that, you know, I had to really contend with if I was to go out to the playground, right, right.

You know, I remember the first time I went to the playground, I got the alcohol wipes and just wipe down the swings and the slides just in case, right? Yeah. And of course, you know, we wore masks that the first several times because just in case well, why risk it?

But raising a baby during a pandemic in retrospect was good. So if there is a have you believe there's a future pandemic coming? I think you know, having a baby then is actually a good idea because you want to spend as much time raising your child anyway. And also for the people who are able to work at home while having a newborn, you know, it was definitely a struggle to do both work and childcare.

But I think it was also a blessing where so many families were able to pop in check in and all that. Right. One of the analogies I thought about regarding having a baby during the pandemic was, let's say your flight is delayed, or you're stuck on the highway because of an accident for several hours.

And you have your favorite book, which in this case would be your baby. You would just read your book, you would take care of your baby and make use of that time. And actually, the best time to take care of your baby or read the book is during a very difficult time.

Because whether you spend an hour reading your book on an airplane or in the lounge because of a five hour delay or at the beach, that hour is all the same. The second positive of the pandemic is we bought a house, we bought a larger house that we did not anticipate buying because we bought a fixer in 2019.

However, after going through the permitting and the remodeling, I soon realized this house was not going to get finished in time to house our growing family. So it was really, really hairy times buying a house that I saw in April 2020. We got into contract in May and we closed I think end of July 2020.

Super, super difficult time decision to leverage up and buy a property. But I believe that well, worst case scenario, the house price declines another 5-10%, maybe 10%. And at least I get to shelter our larger family in a fully remodeled home. So what are your thoughts on buying that house?

Because I remember before buying this house, you were pretty hesitant. Well, I'm always resistant to moving because of the logistics and whatnot. And once I get settled, it's hard for me to want to move. So thinking about moving at that time was hard. But in retrospect, I'm really glad we did it.

We love this house. I'm really happy here. The kids love it. It's good layout for us. And we maximized it to the full extent during the pandemic and still now too. Yeah. There's more levels. So there's actually more privacy in terms of sound noise, which is good for writers like myself who need peace and quiet to write.

And there's more space. It's like 50% larger. Yeah. Because our old house, you know, we had lost, we demolished like 600 square feet of space. And then it was just, it's just so much better now. Yeah. And even though like construction was halted for the longest time, the fact that we were able to move out and not have to live through that was huge because we, you and I did that before kids, we, we lived through a remodel, a gut remodel.

Wow. That was, that was tough. That was tough. We were like living on a day bed. This was one night. It's interesting. We were living on this day bed. That was just two of us, right? Just thinking back to college and then twin size, twin size. And then did I have the, it was my epiphany to, it was like the couch, what is it called?

Like a sofa bed. Right. So I was like, okay, why, why are we both sleeping side by side on this twin size sofa bed? So I was like, Oh, okay. Hey, look, the mattress lifts up. Let's put that on the floor. And then one of us can sleep on that.

And the other one can sleep on the sofa without the mattress on it. And it worked out much better. Yeah. Are you sure that was your idea? I'm sure it was my idea. That sounds like my genius. No, no, no, no, no. But this one was mine, but this is a great, great idea.

Um, so props to you. And this is an example of how you see like a problem and then you just, well, or a situation, you just accept it, but sometimes you just don't want to accept, you shouldn't accept it. There's a better solution. Yeah. You got to let your ideas percolate in your mind.

Yeah. This reminds me of a story when I was in high school, uh, or maybe it was middle school. I was first learning how to write an address on an envelope. And so I was writing the address on the envelope because you know, you put your return to sender address on the top left and then to whoever in the middle.

Right. So I was writing it and, and then, and then I turned over the envelope. I was like, Oh, I wrote the address upside down. I was about to rip it up and throw it away. And my dad was like, what are you doing? It's okay. It doesn't really matter.

You can just put the, you know, I was like, Oh, okay. Don't waste the envelope. But I didn't even think about that. So I wonder how many things are like no dumb moments where you don't really think about where you can improve. So given I was able to convince you to come to this house, it's like so much better over the past almost three years.

What are your thoughts on, you know, getting a larger house? I knew you'd ask me that. You know, like the pain of packing and moving and the cost is, is, is terrible in the beginning. But if it lasts, if we last in a new house, bigger house for 10 more years, wouldn't that be pretty amazing?

Yeah. It's just for me, I don't know. I feel like we don't need more space. And again, I'm harder to convince because once I get settled in, I just don't want to move. And we've also fixed a lot of things in this house. We know where the potential leaks are.

We've, we've repaired them. You know, we know this house inside and out now. So to start from scratch again, I don't know. It's just, well, you know, this is really interesting because I wonder how many people because they just don't want to go through the short term pain of something better.

Never go after their dreams. Who knows if that's actually going to be better though? Well, everything is a risk. Everything is a leap of faith. Yeah. All I know is that the house that we live in is fantastic. We're happy here. There's no need or sense of urgency to move.

There's never a need to do anything once you have the basics. That's the thing. But as I wrote, wrote in the past, the best time to own the nicest house you can afford is when you have children, when you have the most number of heartbeats at home. But don't forget classic tale of Warren Buffett who still lives in his same house that he bought in his what, thirties?

Yeah. His house is like 7,000 square feet. It's like massive. And who knows? There might be an underground bunker that goes two levels down. That's another 5,000. That would be very interesting. I bet. I bet there's some, I mean, he flies private and does whatever. So yes. And Warren Buffett example.

All right, cool. So we're going to move to another house. All right. Good. Good. Good that we agreed. So three, another positive. We homeschooled our son. Yeah. You know, Oh, but the funny thing is, is that it's not funny. It's like we spent two years trying to get him into preschool.

Yeah, I know. And then we spend like a thousand dollars in application fees. He got it. He got into preschool and then five months later we pulled him. Yeah, that was tough. It was tough, but it was definitely tough to lose that spot. But we did have some reassurance that we could get him back in if we needed to.

Yeah. And we just weren't comfortable putting him at risk and then him at risk, us at risk and more importantly, our daughter at risk. Oh, you know what? Now I, now I remember before we pulled him, he was getting sick all the time in those five months and we were too, and we were too.

And I was miserable. I was like, gosh, we're sending our kid to preschool for him to get sick. And then for all of us to get sick. So if all of us got sick, that means our baby would get sick. Yeah. And then when, when the school did reopen, I think it was late in the summer of 2020 it was, it was limited.

Like, Oh yeah. Hybrid. And I think it only started with three hours a day that would be all in the outside. Even if it was dumping rain, we were just, you know, taking all the different factors into consideration and it just, we didn't feel right about it. And I think it all worked out well in the end.

He didn't end up needing to go back to that school. Uh, and we had a great time with him. Yes, it was exhausting, but it was fun. And he learned so much from us and he was so excited too. We were like, do you want to go to homeschool or real school?

And he's like, homeschool. And now I, and now I realize also another reason why we didn't send him back. It's because we have the flexibility to homeschool them. Yeah. We were very fortunate. So my thinking back then was, okay, we both don't have day jobs. We had the flexibility to homeschool them.

If we don't homeschool them and he gets COVID and gets really sick and he gets our daughter sick, how would we live with ourselves? We would basically, I would feel bad because it would just basically be laziness to not homeschool them because we could homeschool them. And I realized that not everybody has that opportunity or ability because of work.

Yeah. And then there's also the positive that we saved like $2,000 a month from the preschool tuition. Yeah. All right. Four, uh, lost some weight. I lost, I first, I gained some weight, you know, like if you have, well, you, you had a baby, so you, you, you have all the reasons to be able to gain weight.

Uh, but you know, the combination of new baby and a pandemic being locked down, less social activity is not a great combination. It was hard. Yeah. But because I played a lot of tennis and then I played a lot of softball, like softball almost every Saturday. Uh, and then I saw like pictures after pictures by the media about people dying from COVID and the number one consistent thing of the people dying or that they were obese or morbidly obese.

It just kind of scared me into trying to lose that weight that I had gained and try to be more healthy in general. How about yourself? Like how did you, how did you view those pictures and how did you view health during the pandemic? I mean, I definitely felt scared.

I mean, if you, when you pay attention to too many news articles, it can send you into a panic, you know? So I, I definitely curtailed my, um, news consumption during the pandemic. Uh, but yeah, I mean, I tried, tried to try to eat well. I mean, I had to stay healthy because I was still breastfeeding.

Um, you know, I didn't exercise as much as I could have and should have. Um, but you know, as time went on, things got better. Um, you know, we got outdoors more, I got moving more, uh, and you know, you sure there were days where I had to eat my feelings because it was so stressed and tired.

Um, but I think in general we did prioritize our health. Um, and you know, we got through it. Yeah. I mean, it was very basic. It was like, do you want to live longer? Uh, do you want to be able to combat COVID if you, if we do get it, um, by being in better shape?

And the answer was yes, especially when you have a newborn. Yeah. So five, we made some money and then we lost some money like 2020, 2021 boom times for risk assets, right? Um, buying the house turned out to be a good move. And then the stocks that we did hold turned out to be good.

And then the muni bonds that I sold to come up with a down payment for this house ended up going well, they went up in 2020, but then went down to any one and then 2022 for sure by about 13%. Um, so that was a good move. Yeah. Um, so making money was what actually made going through the pandemic a little bit more palatable.

Unfortunately, you know, we gave up a lot of our gains from 2021 because of the bear market in 2022, but there was also another positive about the pandemic and that was so many different ideas for content on financial samurai. Yeah. Because of the pandemic, I, I spent it up, I ended up writing more and then I wrote a post called how to predict a stock market bottom like Nostradamus in March, 2020.

So that turned out well, wrote a post called real estate buying strategies during COVID-19. And that turned out well, if you took some of that advice and basically I was writing about stuff that I was thinking about doing. And in general, almost all the time, if I'm writing about something, I'm thinking about it and I'm going to try to take action to do something.

And then I spent time focusing more on online entrepreneurship because when you're stuck at home and you have an online website, you have a website that you might as well try to make more money. And in turn, because of these new business relationships, I think it's helped me at least feel more comfortable about providing for the family.

Yeah. And then finally, what, uh, what happened? Let's see, wrote a bestselling book by this, not that, that was, that was not an easy task. That was not an easy task. The offer came in at the end of 2019. I wasn't really that gung ho about writing because I had written how to engineer your layoff and which has recently been updated thanks to you and your work for 2023.

But then once the pandemic hit, I was like, all right, well, we're going to be locked down for who knows how long might as well take up this off this offer because I don't know in the future, I think if I look back, I would regret not having written this book.

So this book basically took up the entire pandemic to write, edit and market because it came out July 19, 2022 and it became a Wall Street Journal bestseller. So this is something that I'm super proud of because when our kids ask, Hey, do you remember what happened during the pandemic?

Well, hopefully they'll remember, like at least our son will know. Yeah. But our daughter might not remember, right? She probably won't remember, but I'll just say, you know, daddy and mommy, we decided to write an editor book that did well to help other people achieve financial freedom sooner rather than later.

So overall, the pandemic, because we survived and because we don't have long COVID, I think was maybe a net positive. I wouldn't have written the book. I wouldn't have bought this house. I wouldn't have made as much as we did from risk assets. I wouldn't have spent as much time with our son.

Right. So it sounds like win-win-wins. However, there are always regrets. And so I have several regrets that we didn't do during the pandemic. What's your biggest one? The biggest one, the absolute biggest one was that we didn't move to Honolulu, Hawaii before the pandemic began or the first year of the pandemic.

I had been looking intently since 2016 to buy a nice property in Honolulu, Hawaii. Right. You were with me, right? When we saw like, went to see some open houses, nothing really, you know, captivated us. Oh, no, no, no. Okay. There are some amazing houses, but they were out of our, you know, they're expensive.

Yeah. There's this amazing house, like 4,600 square feet, five bedroom, five bath writers den. And it wasn't even just a den. It was like a full one bedroom, one bath with a living room and kitchen like off the side of the house. And then there was a pool and it was only a block and a half away from the beach.

And I was just like, oh, this house is amazing. This is awesome. We saw it so many times. We did. Over the years. And you know, the prices were, it kept on ticking down. I was like, oh, okay, let's wait a little bit longer. Tick down a little further.

Well, there were just some quirky things. I don't know. Like what? What was quirky about? Oh, there was like, the way they did the kitchen was kind of weird. There was like two kitchens stuck together. That's cool. That's the back kitchen in the front kitchen. They could have designed it better.

And that was like the interesting Mormon church across the street or something. Yeah, there was that was congregation czar. Yeah. So there was a lot of foot traffic and not that much. I don't know. We saw a lot of people coming and going. Bottom line, we should have bought that house because we don't enjoy that house with a lot more space.

Just being in Hawaii. Think about it for two years during the pandemic before they started prohibiting visitors, international visitors, and then just being able to spend more time with my parents. I know it's not with your parents, but we didn't see your parents anyway during the pandemic. So you know, the bottom line is, man, I really wish I had the guts to pull the trigger to buy that house in Hawaii.

You know, there's two hard things. I pulled the trigger to buy this house in the most difficult of times. But it's another thing to pull the trigger to buy an expensive house and move your entire family. Yeah, I would have been very hard to convince to especially with a newborn.

Yeah, that's the thing. The new when you have a newborn, you have doctors you're familiar with. You know, you have issues where you have to heal and see checkups. But the thing here's the thing, though, Hawaii has the best health care. I know. It's just it's, you know, moving within your city is one thing but moving to another city and then actually out of state and Hawaii is an island right you can't drive there you have to fly there I don't know it's just very different moving logistics.

I know but man I've been thinking about this for seven years now since 2016. It's okay. We have a great house now we're happy here. It's all good. Next time. Next time there's pandemic where we're gone. I swear to God, we're we're we're going. So to one of the regrets I thought was regret but then I thought about a little more maybe not a regret.

I didn't fly more often. So best got really lucky that time you did fly. Yeah, November 20. Yeah, because right after you came back, there was a big surge. So you escaped that. But you think about it like 2020 2021 flights were cheaper. True. It's less crowded. It's probably safer because there's less people.

But I now realize I remember now, anybody who did travel or seen as traveling for non essential reasons, were seen as selfish. You know, we were all trying to contain the spread as much as possible. So if you're going to go you know, to Bali to Hawaii, I remember that now like people were flying and sharing on Instagram or whatever how fabulous their lives were shamed by Yeah, so there was that social pressure and also the unknown of and again, if I flew somewhere, I might catch something on the way back because it's like so stupid, right?

Like everybody was afraid of getting COVID outdoors or in lines so that we social distanced at the airport. And then you you all pack into a plane. I know. I know. I remember reading some headline to about someone who rented an RV to like drive across the country, but which was great for her.

But then she ended up getting like, shamed by the media for it because she was endangering other people by crossing state lines and yada yada yada. There was a lot of shame being thrown around. Yeah, there's peer pressure. Yeah. And so I guess I'm proud to say that we did not contribute to the pandemic.

We didn't travel until I traveled in November 2021. Yeah, after the vaccine, I think was available then. Yeah, yeah, it was available. And even if we wanted to travel to like places like Asia, there were two week quarantine periods. You get there and you got to stay in a hotel for maybe tolerable by yourself, but no, not with a whole family.

No, no, no, no. All right, third regret should have owned a vacation single family home instead of a vacation condo. This was interesting, because we have friends who have vacation properties in Napa Sonoma, Lake Tahoe, Stinson Beach, these are 45 minutes to three and a half hour drives away.

And they were able to live a more enjoyable life during the pandemic because they could just drive there and mix things up. Right. And the whole the whole property is their own. They don't have to worry about other people. Exactly. So we on the other hand, own a condo at a resort.

So we could have gone up there, but not in the earlier early early days because the resort closed down. Yes, it did. So it closed down for at least three months, maybe six, I don't remember. It was and it was like sudden to whenever there was a surge was like, Okay, we're shutting down.

And we're like, wait, what's happening? And right. And so not only could we not go up there, we couldn't even earn rental income. Yeah, exactly. So it was like a lot of reservations that had to be canceled because of the closures. So this is something good to know, folks.

If you own a single family property as a vacation property, you're the king and queens of the castle, you can do what you want, you don't have to fear people using your stuff, sleeping in your beds, whatever it is. But now that the pandemic is over, I did ask our kids, do you like the Lake Tahoe vacation property, or this really nice single family home, our friend owns in Sonoma Valley, and they all said the condo vacation property.

Because even though the condo is 80% cheaper than the single family vacation property, our friend owns, it's actually way bigger, right? The land is like 10x bigger, many more amenities and things to do. All right. Finally, there's a couple more regrets and has to do with investing. One I was thinking, maybe I should have speculated more, I should have been more intentional, and allocated a certain amount of money to speculate on all these wild and crazy things like meme stocks, crypto and NFTs.

You wrote a post about NFTs. And at the end of the post, you're like, what the hell is this stupid? Who's the hell is buying this? But the thing is, folks, it kind of doesn't really matter how stupid the asset is. If you make money, if you buy it, and it goes up 5x, and you sell, you make a lot of money.

So the idea is to be a good investor, you need to actually recognize the trends. And no matter how dumb the investment is, it's like if capital is flying towards these investments, you want to be involved. But you can't make this type of speculative money if you don't pay attention.

So in retrospect, I should have specifically allocated a lump sum of money. And maybe I should have spent an hour a day trying to speculate. But this is a revisionist history. I mean, maybe I could have lost my shirt as well. Yeah. And then finally, I should have sold more stock, de-risked more when valuations in the tech field, tech sector, we're getting out of control at the end of 2021.

And if that happened, we wouldn't have round tripped many of our big gains from 2020 and 2021. But thankfully, hopefully, all of you are wealthier now than you were in early 2020. So that's basically it talked about some positives, some negatives. The worst negative, of course, are the deaths due to the virus.

And we can never get back those lives. So we have to remember them and we have to appreciate our lives. What are your thoughts in conclusion about the past two and a half, three years? Well, I'm I'm proud that we got through it and that we were productive during the time.

And it's definitely something that we will remember forever. Yeah, most definitely. We need to spend more time with our loved ones, our parents, if they're still around, our uncles and aunts and our nieces and nephews. You know, I'm reading the Good Life book about the 80 year Harvard longitudinal study about what makes a good life.

And the consistent theme is having good relationships with the people you care about the most and also having some soft relationships with just people you see infrequently as well to keep in touch, to listen, to understand, to empathize with their situation, and to just be there for them in times of need.

Because the longer we live, the more good and bad things will happen. And so just just having more kindness and having more patience is so important. And that's something that I have tried to adopt and I will adopt going forward. Because for all of us, I think it was difficult times.

Well, we try to look at the positives, and we try to be productive and take action. Because if there's another one coming, I think we're going to be better prepared. Yeah, there's going to be less fear obviously depends on the virality of the next virus. But I think we're going to get through it better.

Yeah, and I think all of us will. So we'd love to hear from all of you on what were some of the positives and some of the negatives and the regrets during the past two and a half years of the pandemic. Really try to think back to the months of March, April, May, June, July, August of 2020.

Because it's easy to forget. And it's easy for me to forget. And the only reason why I haven't forgotten is because I wrote a lot of posts back then. And I recorded a lot of episodes back then. And this has been one of my main reasons for keeping Financial Samurai going for so long is so that I won't forget because experiences tend to appreciate over time.

And experiences, if you remember them, help teach you more about the past, you can live a better future. Thanks so much, everyone for listening. If you'd like to subscribe to our weekly newsletter, it's at financialsamurai.com/news. If you're looking for an affordable term life insurance policy, both my wife and I got two 20 year term policies during the pandemic.

And that provided some tremendous mental relief. You can check out policygenius@financialsamurai.com/pg. And if you'd like to support my writing, check out buy this not that at financialsamurai.com/buythisnotthat. Thanks, everyone for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it. And we'd love a positive five star review. Take care. Bye.