How I survived the pandemic (financially)
Back in 2019 I rented a house after years of sharing house with others for my sister to start her high school. My parents would also travel back and forth between Australia and Vietnam so I wanted to rent a not-so-small house for our family.
Here’s some of the actions that I took to survive the pandemic financially
Shopping for essentials
Then pandemic happened, and it changed everything. There are good and not-so-good things during that period. The good thing is that my company allowed me to work from home and schools started remote learning so that saved a lot of time for travelling for both of us.
But because of shortage of supply for essentials for the first few months, we had to develop a habit of constantly searching for available stock online and buy more than usual.
Searching for cheaper rent
After a few months , I found that people are moving out of city area to outer surbubs to avoid high rents, so the landlords reduced rental price. I saw this as a chance to save money, because the not only the rent is cheaper in the city, but also there is free tram zone there that could benefit shopping.
Moving from a house to an apartment is technically downsizing, and even better, I found one that is fully furnished, so I sold most of my furniture and appliances and got some good money out of it.
Additionally, the building that I moved into has gym and swimming pool for its residence, so I saved some money for gym membership.
Refinancing investment property
For my investment property, there couldn’t be a better time for it because the rent actually went up due to more people moving further from the city.
The tenant who had lived there for 2 years moved out and I had no trouble increasing the rent and nobody tried to negotiate the price!
Also during this time, banks decreased interest rates to support home owners and I was able to get an incredibly low fixed rate for 2 years! In other words, I finally got positive cash after 2 years of negative gearing.
Looking for part-time works
Also during the pandemic, the number of online jobs increased insanely! So I signed up for sites like Fiverr, Upwork and Freelancer and started working on small projects in my spare time.
It wasn’t fancy at first because the competition is so high with so many freelancers from overseas willing to offer unbeatable prices! So I actually did the first few tasks for free and tried to deliver the best quality to build up my reputation and then increased my rate over time.
The money that I got from freelance work is still not much compared to my main salary because I still had to focus on my full-time job. But the point is, had anything happened to my main job, say redundancy, then I could do more freelance work to cover my living espense until I found a new job.
Lessions learned
Pandemic was sure a tough time for everyone right? But the world has faced a lot of crisises like that over centuries and humanity has incredible survival instinct, as long as we don’t give up we can always find a way to solve our problems.
Some key takeaways from the pandemic:
- Don’t panic. Keep your head cool at all time even for shopping
- Keep looking for alternatives for everything, even place of living
- Having to work from home is a good chance to earn more income
And I believe these lessons will carry over in the future whether we have another pandemic or not.
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