Realcent.org

It seems like despite low interest rates, no one has much spare cash - everyone is so levered up with debt they have nothing left over to put it metals. The few tech and banking gurus who have GTH money don't seem interested in gold/silver. The real economy is stagnant despite high stock market. Dollar is up on the USD index despite record national debt. Copper, oil, and steel are down as the China growth story falters. Down is up and up is down. All this craziness has changed my perspective from accumulating metal and waiting to wanting to develop income streams to stay ahead enough to buy metal in the first place. For you older guys who have enough assets to ride out the rest of your days then I say nothing wrong with bunker mentality of guns n gold. But anyone under 50 that doesn't already have a killer job needs to be getting creative in the hunt for dollars - some days you feel like gerbil on a treadmill but if you are on Realcent you are already ahead of most people in terms of awareness. Just my stream of consciousness rant while I wait to pick fiancé up from the airport.

PMs are for wealth preservation. Not investment. You certainly need income stream from a trade or business and or else the mechanisms (e.g., mini farm) to take care of basic needs of food, water, shelter, and security.

It was posted today on FBN that 1 in 4 of the middle class couldn't gather $400 without borrowing, selling, or pawning something. That's scary.

To use as wealth preservation make sense to focus on wealth first. If you don't build anything , no need to protect right ?

if you anticipate having to sell your stack to pay for expenses... you shouldn't be stacking. An emergency fund of four to six months should take precedence. You could probably start "small" stacking at the point when you have one to two months expenses saved up, and increase as you go. But if you're carrying high interest credit card debt you should be working on eliminating that prior to SHTF stacking. Interest rates could jack up overnight if the fan turns smelly brown... and believe it... the banks aren't going to leave your rates unmodified. Even if they're supposedly "fixed"... they'll find a workaround that works in their favor, not yours.

I guess what I am saying is that everything that should being going up given money printing isn't and everything that should be stagnate or declining is doing the opposite as well. So I was just venting frustration that it seems like my time/money is better used in getting capital goods or projects to generate cash flow vs stacking, whereas in recent past I had been rewarded for stacking in the run from $8 silver to $40.

in the present milieu you will be penalized, not rewarded

In looking at the present state of world affairs and the economy in general, I have been using any disposable income to stock up on food and other items that are CONSTANTLY increasing in cost. I feel that is of utmost importance right now. Wealth preservation is a good stock of barter items as well as PM's.

AGgressive Metal wrote:I guess what I am saying is that everything that should being going up given money printing isn't and everything that should be stagnate or declining is doing the opposite as well. So I was just venting frustration that it seems like my time/money is better used in getting capital goods or projects to generate cash flow vs stacking, whereas in recent past I had been rewarded for stacking in the run from $8 silver to $40.

I think we all understand your point to an extent. Even us old guys have limits - some have expressed them. The purpose of PMs is to carry your wealth to the other side of a crisis. OK - so when is this crisis ever going to end! (Rhetorical question.) It's been going on for 8 years at a fever pitch, 15 years at a lower level, and depending on where you draw the line anywhere from 40 to 100+ years as a policy of increasing progressive-ism, collectivism and accommodation, using a gradual move to a complete fiat system, debt as a policy, and now elimination of cash with total control of finances by electronic means. For some of us old guys we're starting to wonder if the life of the crisis is about to out-live our own lives. What do you do with that? (Again, rhetorical.) That said, there is a mathematical limit to the Ponzi scheme that is our global fiat-based derivative fueled economies, and every year that goes by puts the world economy at greater peril of a total system crash. (So, no worries, for me, quite yet. I'm sure it's going to some down - but I'm also prepared for it to last awhile longer, and to also take the form of a long, slow crash if that happens.)

Getting past that mini-rant, your last sentence says it all. You're thinking of PMs as investment, not wealth. Wealth is about how many ounces you have, whereas investment is great concern about what fiat price you bought at and what fiat price you would have to sell at if you sold now. The point of wealth is exactly this - to not sell (unless you trade it for a means of capital creation, or unless you have a life-threatening emergency. It's to hold onto it to get you to the other side of the emergency that we're actually already in the middle of. (Don't for a second believe that we're not already in the middle of it.)

We've written several prior threads (or at least posts in threads) about this topic of wealth versus investment. You need a means of wealth creation - PMs isn't that. PMs is the result of wealth creation. Wealth creation is: a wage-paying (or resource-trading) job, be it trading foreign currency, selling real estate, teaching desirable classes, having a skilled trade, farming or ranching for production, etc. You then need to use those wages to store up your self-sufficiency safety net: food, water, spare cash for expenses, fuel, transportation, shelter, self-protection, medical supplies, clothes, misc other consumbable supplies (a long list perhaps), etc. Then after you have some months built-up, then you can start converting some of your fiat and/or trade goods to PMs, and store that as wealth.

Well said. Its not the financial worlds paper value of silver (gold), it's the ounces of silver and their use as a preservation vehicle.

Gold and silver are the only true measures of wealth. That has been the case for almost all of recorded history. Unfortunately, that truth carriers very little weight these days as it is only understood by 1% to 2% of the population (and many of these people work for the banks ).

I think too many hard money advocates have been fighting the last war. They envision the dollar collapsing amid frantic bank runs and exponential price increases, like we've seen in the past. Of course those banks runs and hyper-inflationary blow offs occurred during times (like the 1930s in the U.S) and in places (like Zimbabwe 2004) that were far more reliant on cash for day to day transactions. Today in the West, cash is to considered to be a quaint relic; fit only for flea markets and the Good Humor man.

This system will collapse but IMO a war, large terrorist attack or environmental disaster will get the blame. Or it is just as likely to play out in a way that is unprecedented. It is my belief that every previous crash had unforeseen elements that most were unprepared for.

AGgressive Metal wrote: The few tech and banking gurus who have GTH money don't seem interested in gold/silver.

I'm assuming that GTH means "Go to Hades"...

It is a bit curious that more wealthy people who have several million in cash don't invest more in PM's. Perhaps they are investing more than we realize, but are trusting someone else to store the metals for them and don't realize their faith is potentially misplaced. Perhaps they don't want to be considered the next Hunt Brothers. Maybe they don't want to invest in something that does well when things are getting messy in the world- this notion is a bit like most people saying they don't short stocks because they either don't understand how it is done or they don't want to bet on something negative.

Some day we'll all hear something and say "Oh that was it! I should've know better..." Right now, I wonder what the "that" will be. Hmmmm....

Recyclersteve wrote:
Some day we'll all hear something and say "Oh that was it! I should've know better..." Right now, I wonder what the "that" will be. Hmmmm....

We have been in "that" situation for some time.
The problem is that everyone seems to think that there will be some big defining event that will trigger things. It will more likely be an escalation of the slow slide we have been in for a while. It will sneak up on most people because they are too busy watching Dancing with the Stars or their favorite "reality" show instead of paying attention to current events.

Z00 wrote:

Recyclersteve wrote:
Some day we'll all hear something and say "Oh that was it! I should've know better..." Right now, I wonder what the "that" will be. Hmmmm....

We have been in "that" situation for some time.
The problem is that everyone seems to think that there will be some big defining event that will trigger things. It will more likely be an escalation of the slow slide we have been in for a while. It will sneak up on most people because they are too busy watching Dancing with the Stars or their favorite "reality" show instead of paying attention to current events.

you hit the nail on the head RIGHT THERE! +100000

Normalcy bias....