Making a stupid decision, why did I do that!

We all made some stupid decisions during our lives and ended up regretting them.

Back in the 90's I was doing awesome while working as a police officer for the Providence Police Department and between my regular hours and all the overtime, I was averaging around 70 to 80 thousand dollars a year. The money was great but it came at a cost, I was working too many hours and hardly had time to enjoy my time with the family. Things were going fine, you know I had the typical young family, living in a middle class neighborhood, two car garage, swimming pool, friendly neighbors, the wife had a minivan, and we went on vacations. It was the typical American dream, especially for me, being a Cambodian refugee and achieving everything I wanted at a young age, probably because of my Italian family who took me in and made me who I am today. As my family expanded, I started to think about my future and how I can make more money and spent more time with them.

One day while on duty riding around my post, I saw a real estate for sale sign on a house and decided to call and find out what they were asking? I ended up meeting a real estate investor who was willing to help me buy houses. He was in the business of flipping houses and I was eager to find other forms of income and was very interested in buying as many houses as I can to become financially free. Our relationship grew and I ended up buying four houses from him and ended up owning a total of nine houses after buying a few more on my own. At this point, I was really busy managing all my houses and not taking on any overtime hours with my police job. The police job was great but I really didn't see myself working the whole 20 years for a 50% pension. My mind was focused on becoming a business entrepreneur because I minored in business after graduating college and was always interested in becoming self-employed. Now that I was collecting good rents, I leveraged all my houses and got business loans to open up a small Cambodian take-out restaurant, sold it, bought a bigger restaurant, and bought a banquet facility.

Here is where I made my stupid mistake, having all these properties and keeping the doors open for business, I took out all my deferred compensation fund and city pension from the police department. At the time, I had around 70 thousand dollars accumulated between the city pension and the high yield deferred compensation fund. The deferred compensation fund did awesome because the early 2000's the market was doing great. Imagine if I left all that tax free money alone, how much it could have grown today in 2025? The money served it purposes and I really can't keep blaming myself, life moves on and I had to deal with the housing crisis in 2008. Today, because of my past experiences and resilience, I am doing well even though I don't have a city pension or own multiple houses anymore. In life, you have to always keep going and never give up. Obviously, 2008 was a bad time for anyone who was in the real estate business and after selling everything and or losing it to the banks, I opened a Cambodian restaurant on the Eastside of Providence, Rhode Island, located close to Brown University. The restaurant was opened from 2007 and closed down during the Covid-19 pandemic. I was lucky and made a good business decision to buy the building where the restaurant was, a mixed use building with an upstairs apartment generating passive income. It's not a city pension but the location is recession proof because of the close proximity to ivory league schools and the value and appreciation will hopefully be enough for me to retire.

You always have to have a plan B or C and what do they say, "if you fail to plan , then you plan to fail."