One year ago, at this precise moment, I was unloading the trunk of my car after the mother of all Costco runs. I was actively preparing for the pandemic, a process that started for me in January 2020, just a few days after returning from a fabulous Caribbean vacation. While away I started hearing about a virus working its way through China and had a bad feeling. Having conducted a significant amount of business in Asia throughout my career and having watched SARS and MERS work its way through the region, I knew that all manners of business and everyday life could potentially shutdown if the virus appeared in the United States. By early February 2020 I was actively warning my colleagues it was time to prepare to go remote. I knew we were about to go off a cliff...my colleagues looked at me like I was nuts. But I digress, this week I want to share my thoughts on the brands that exist in our lives somewhere between personal and financial.

Every time I walk into Costco it’s with a deep sense of pride and admiration. Pride in the company’s ability to maintain fair and reasonable margins on its products, admiration for the company’s ability to sell a soda and a pretty darn good hot dog at the same price for over 35 years (the price of $1.50 has been the same since 1985 and in FY2019 the company sold 151 million combos bringing in about $226.5 million). But most of all, I have pride as a shareholder. It’s the reason I spend my every visit no matter what I purchase $400 there and not at another discount club. Not that the other discount clubs aren’t fantastic, because they are, I’m just not a shareholder. If I am going to spend hard-earned dollars on what my family needs the most, I may as well spend those dollars where I am an owner.

My Uncle Jack, long departed from this earth, was a fantastic long-term value investor. I will never forget sitting at his kitchen table in the 1980’s listening to him and my parents discuss the stock market. He prided himself on his large holding in Sears, Roebuck and Co. He talked like he owned the place and shopped there like it was the only store on earth. I asked him one day how much Sears stock he owned. His answer, “Do you know those tiles on the floor of each Sears store, well, I probably own 1/10th of one tile in one store.” At the time, Sears had hundreds, if not thousands of stores across the United States.

If Uncle Jack owned 1/10th of one tile in one Sears store, I probably own 1/100,000th of one tile in one Costco store, but it doesn’t make a bit of difference. I am in it with Costco for the long-haul. One year later, I am in it with another partner, Moderna. My mother-in-law called me months ago and said to purchase Moderna stock. She had strongly recommended Google at its IPO and Bitcoin at $2,500 and because it was my mother-in-law, I rolled my eyes and ignored her both times. Big mistakes on my part. I made a promise to myself that whatever pick she had for me in the future, when it came, no matter how crazy, if I had the money, I would buy it. I’ve done incredibly well on her Moderna tip and I am looking forward to when I will transcend from simply an investor to a customer when it’s my turn to roll up my left sleeve and put their product in my arm. I am putting every bit of trust and faith in this company to do right by me and millions upon millions of other people. If they succeed, we will all succeed.

My father had cancer when I was a child. There was a company named Chiron Corporation at the time (later sold to Novartis) that made a difficult to obtain oncology drug, and my father desperately needed it. I will never forget going with my mother to Chiron so she could plead with them to secure their drug for my father. They agreed and my mother was forever appreciative. Many years later I saw a dividend check at my mother’s house and I asked her, “Who is Chiron?” She told me that within weeks of them providing their treatment to my father, she purchased a few shares. My mother had no money at the time, but she took her last few dollars and made a small investment in the company that attempted to save my father’s life.

My President’s Day 2020 wasn’t all doomsday prepping, it also involved a visit to a lovely cat café with my children – always a success when you extricate said children with happy memories sans adopted pet. One year later I’m not unpacking my car after a mega-Costco run, instead I am attempting to unpack one year of condensed, intense memories that involve the various partnerships we have in our lives; personal, financial and those in between.

Hope you enjoyed reading the latest blog from Ms. Money, our resident Gen X expert. Any stocks mentioned in this blog post are not an endorsement or recommendation to purchase shares.