Posted on 12/27/2013 5:44:30 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Since November, financial advisor David Marotta has been publishing a series of blog posts on how to manage your money in the event of a financial apocalypse—as in a world of hyperinflation, governmental collapse, and anarachic mobs. You know, the standard stuff of a doomsday prepper's fever dreams. While Marotta admits he has some fears about the direction of the country (the man's not an Obamacare fan, to say the least) most of it seems to be fairly tongue-in-cheek material aimed at talking potential clients down from investing in some of the crazy, survivalist scams advertised on conservative talk radio. (Sadly, The Washington Examiner seems to have missed the humor).
And the first scam on his agenda? Plowing all your money into gold, of course. Here's his biblically inflected explanation of why toting around a suitcase of gold come the end times—and at today's prices, a $1 million in gold coins would fit in a suitcase—would be a suboptimal strategy:
If there really is a collapse of the money supply it is difficult to believe that your briefcase of pretty coins will still have any purchasing power near $1 million. In the 1970s, Christian singer Larry Norman made popular the Apocalyptic song lyric, “A piece of bread could buy a bag of gold” based on Revelation 6:6. In The End, I’d rather not have bought as much gold as possible.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
I recommend both, plus an arsenal.
Exactly. And this is a point that too many people seem to miss. Especially those who spout that "You can't eat gold" BS.
Of course you can't. (Well, you CAN but it's non-nutrative). Why would one eat gold when there is plenty of canned goods to eat?
Gold is meant to preserve and protect your major monetary assets until the next economy arises. Then you can buy back in.
Aw crap. All I bought was gold.
I am so screwed.
That's what I stash. Pint plastic bottles of vodka and whiskey. Verrrrrry good barter material.
I guess it’s not too hard to roast coffee beans, even over an open fire.
The problem that I see is that the smell would travel far and wide...
The most important element of a disaster plan is the timetable. For example, what was the timetable of the Great Depression in the US?
1929 was the crash of the stock market. This affected those who invested in the market, at first. But it was just the start of the growing unemployment that peaked about 1934, about 4 years later. And unemployment didn’t really hurt until you were unemployed.
What did hurt a lot of people was when banks were closed, starting in 1933, which meant that people were denied their savings reserves. At about the same time, the private ownership of gold was forbidden. These two actions really forced people who had been careful with their money into the depression.
But overlap that with *deflation*. This effectively meant that prices continued to drop because nobody had any cash money. Even though the Dust Bowl, “the dirty thirties”, wiped out tens of thousands of small farms from Texas North to Canada, there was still far more food produced in farms than there were people able to pay for it.
This only really hurt when prices bottomed out in 1933 and ‘34, when it cost more to ship food to market than it was worth. So on one hand, too much food just rotting in the fields, and elsewhere, people were starving.
Importantly, in trying to protect the people who were suffering the worst, the government did help some of them, but hurt others who could have been okay, and dragged out the depression for years.
So on one hand, for some people the government was good, but for others, it was very bad. And in the balance, it hurt more than it helped in many ways.
And this is perhaps the most important lesson that we today should remember. Government “help” is a devil’s deal, so unless you are devastated, go out of your way to avoid it.
What people either really need, or what they want so much that it is the same thing as a need.
There is plenty of historical evidence as to what those things are. Mark Slavo has shown the types of goods that are valuable when order collapses.
Silver has value that is incremental enough to be useful as a currency. As useful as barter is, a compact medium of exchange like silver is very desirable. Direct barter has logistical difficulties, which is why silver & gold work so well.
List what you can’t live without and what you would be the least willing to live without.
The ammo situation has loosened up a lot. It will never get back to pre Sandy Hook days. But it is going to get worse, even without a “collapse”. You can bank on that.
After extensive and time consuming research I recommend a Sawyer water filter. Either (or both) the .1 or the .02. Very impressive technology.
For barter, several cases of the cheapest bourbon or whiskey you can get in *glass* bottles. Unless opened, bourbon keeps essentially forever.
Finally, and I say this (only partially) tongue in cheek, a stable of healthy and sturdy prostitutes would get you any goods or services you could want. Best currency around in a collapse. If you have the means to protect them
I think maybe the disconnect is the idea of buying gold “instead of” the other things.
You buy gold AFTER the other things, if you have any wealth left to preserve.
Absolutely correct. You couldn't say that too many times.
and how long do you shoot your starving neighbors and wandering mobs?
I’m sure you’re one of those guys with remote wooded acreage and a spring in a temperate climate, and lots of bullets
but the average suburban home or country farmhouse was never built to become a block house.
I know from my family pioneer history of 250 years ago what it took to survive when there were roving bands of people willing to kill you and take what you had. I am neither in a climate nor a setting where defending by siege is feasible
My worst case plan is to go on the move when necessary and to be able to carry with us what we need to survive until reaching a place that is safe, and/or to safely hide or otherwide dispose of what wealth we can’t carry until we can get back for it. That may take a while. No further details necessary in this forum
Gold may be great in the long, long, long term, BUT...
How long before society calms down enough to even think about civilized barter/trade after a SHTF scenario?
Gold isn’t even on my radar.
In the end times, ammo will be the new currency.
Most likely 12 gauge and .22
That’s a damn good idea. Buy the big bottles and fill 20 0z. soda bottles. Good for barter.
In a collapse scenario I can see silver and gold quickly become THE barter item to have. All of these nuts who think it will be shoot to kill f everyone are wrong. I see no reason why reasonable humans will act more or less like civilized people AFTER the unprepared learn their lesson...
I buy bulk Costa Rican Tres Rios, Magnolia. I roast my own.
http://www.coffeebeancorral.com/ has instructions on how to roast your own.
I've used everything from a cast iron skillet to an air pop-corn popper.
/johnny
Selco wrote about such a family that had gold and silver in Sarajevo during the siege. a gang got wind of it and kidnapped the father and the son. I believed that the Son survived the father didn’t and neither did the gold.
Yep, guns, ammo, metals and food.
Tried canning some hot wings I found on sale. They taste great.
So you going out in the middle of shtf with your junk silver and trying to buy a can of beans is safer than someone laying low with their cans of beans?
Read what Selco a real life shtf survivor has to say:
I will add this; Right now in a land of plenty there are people willing to fight and kill for a pair of sneakers or a big screen tv what do you think they would be will to do for a can of beans when they haven’t eaten in a week?
There’s a Great Storm coming everyone is feeling it and its one of the reason everyone is on edge. Deep down the alarm bells are ring the nerves on on edge and the mind is unsettled.
Its your choice you can prep or you can stand around on a bridge waiting for FEMA to bring you a bottle of water, a MRE, a warm blanket and a kiss for your boo-boo and maybe you can even get your picture as you stand there on the national news.
Any one with half a brain can look around and see for themselves what is happening right before their eyes.
So listen to what the bible says: A prudent man sees danger and takes refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it. NIV Proverbs 22:3
One of the things Selco covers in this article is the fact that many will not accept that a breakdown is occurring even as they watch it happening before their eyes. Why don’t they realize it? It’s caused by a condition called ‘Normalcy Bias’ a mental state people enter when facing a disaster.
It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of governments to include the populace in its disaster preparations. The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster never has occurred then it never will occur. It also results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation.
A good article on ‘Normalcy Bias’ is on our own ChocChipCookies Blog The Survival Mom:
http://thesurvivalmom.com/2010/12/29/normalcy-bias/
You either prepare and stand on your own beholden to no one or you become dependent on others to provide your basic needs and become their ‘serf’. Me I don’t want to be beholden to anyone for providing what is needed for me and mine. I certainly don’t want to have to kiss some ‘gubberment’ third class bureaucratic to try and coax some help from them, I don’t want some ‘jack booted’ thug herding me in line and telling me where to stand, sit, eat or sleep. And last but not least I don’t want to be shut up in with a bunch of ‘zombies’ and have to worry about not only trying to get basic necessities but having to fight to keep what I manage to get.
http://tomeaker.com/kart/Preparedness1j.pdf NOTE! THIS IS A FREE DOWNLOAD. I DO NOT MAKE ONE CENT OFF MY PREPAREDNESS MANUAL!
For those of you who haven’t started already it’s time to prepare almost past time maybe. You needed to be stocking up on food guns, ammo, basic household supplies like soap, papergoods, cleaning supplies, good sturdy clothes including extra socks, underwear and extra shoes and boots, cash (I myself have been putting up change for the past few years both for the metal content and the fact that using change to make what purchases you can will move you down the the list of possible marks during shtf), tools, things you buy everyday start buying two and put one up.
As the LDS say “When the emergency is upon us the time for preparedness has past.”
Again I like to recomend FReeper’s ChocoChipCookie Blog The Survival Mom (Please Blog Police let this one slide!) Where you can get lots of useful information like:
http://thesurvivalmom.com/2011/11/20/8-morale-boosters-for-any-worst-case-scenario/
http://thesurvivalmom.com/2010/02/02/survival-priorities-the-rule-of-three/
And More
Also there is Ferfal’s Blog a survivor of Argentina’s first collapse:
And there is Selco’s Blog a Bosnian War survivor at:
“There is no greater disaster than to underestimate danger. Underestimation can be fatal.”
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