Economic Quarantine, a Diary: Day 6

Day 6 (Wednesday, March 18th)

I had an Amazon (Whole Foods) route from 9-11.  It was eerily quiet in Whole Foods and many of the shelves were bare.  The hot bar, restaurant and all the self-service bins were closed.  It's all about minimizing contact I guess.  What really shocked me though was how empty the delivery shelves were.  I was only assigned 3 small deliveries.

After that route I was able to pick up a 3 hour afternoon route.  I'm frustrated with Amazon right now because yesterday they issued a press release saying they were hiring 100,000 new people for warehouse and delivery jobs due to overwhelming demand.  That's garbage.  It's so hard to get work right now at Amazon.  I would love to work a full day, but all I've been getting are scraps.  Now they want to hire more drivers?  Why?

Gas is getting less expensive.  Other than the new phone plans, that's the only thing I spent money on Wednesday.  Thornton's sent me an offer to save $.15/gallon, which brought it down to $1.84.  I filled up the tank for $25.  

Yesterday right before markets closed I placed a limit order for a REIT I've owned in the past.  It didn't reach my desired price before the close.  Right after the market closed, the company announced it was suspending its monthly dividend.  Fortunately I was able to cancel the order after hours because the stock went way down today.  I'm still keeping an eye on the stock - it's even cheaper now - but I'm using funds from the house I sold last week and my intentions are to replace the lost rent with dividends, so that doesn't work.

We went to Sprint to change phone plans.  They have a new plan called Unlimited Kickstart.  It's $35/month and you get a $300 prepaid card for signing up.  That will help us cut costs.  It was surprisingly busy at the Sprint store.  I found out most of the stores closed down and consolidated into stores that offered repair services, so everyone was going there.  I got lucky, kind of:  our current phones aren't compatible, so I selected a used LG phone.  The cashier rang me up and activated the phone, only to find the battery was defective.  She ended up giving me a brand new phone for the same $50 price.

My stock investments have lost over $100,000.  It's shocking.  I'm not selling.  I know it's going to take some time, but they will bounce back.  I've bought a lot at deeply discounted prices so I am depending on it.  Today I deployed most of the funds from the rental property I sold.  The majority of it went into Vereit.  It's insanely cheap and, if the dividend stays the same, I will earn as much from this stock as I was earning from rent on that house... with significantly less effort!  I'm not naive though and realize rent concessions for some of these shuttered retailers might hurt the company in the coming months.

Last thing, a bit of (hopefully) good news.  I got a 2 night booking for the Airbnb on Sunday.  The guest booked the non-refundable rate and is coming from Atlanta, which is in driving distance.  It's discounted fairly heavily, but still $200 that we weren't getting already.