Catholic Info
Traditional Catholic Faith => The Catholic Bunker => Topic started by: SeanJohnson on January 05, 2022, 08:46:53 AM
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It is heresy even to suggest it, but the answer ultimately depends upon why you bought it.
If you purchased silver as a hedge against inflation, then you are sorely disappointed: Despite a 40-year high in inflation, silver spot is currently priced at a paltry $23.20/oz.
Similarly, if you purchased silver for investment purposes, counting on near prices still less than half of their peak in the 2007-2011 crisis, you have been rangebound for years, making silver one of the worst annual yield performers you could choose.
On the other hand, if you purchased silver as an insurance-based commodity for the purchase or barter for goods and services, then the jury is still out. Like carrying a life insurance policy, you have bet against yourself, and may have been buying silver for 20+ years with no benefit to show for it (or paying 30% premiums if buying it today). The decades go by, and my worthless fiat currency still buys bread at the store. But if it couldn’t, would people who have bread still give it to me for metal?
In Zimbabwe, they did, but that may be because hyperinflation was specific to their country (ie., the people with food could sell the gold and silver and replenish their supplies in other countries.
But if the hyperinflation was global, and cheap food wasn’t available anywhere, would you still be able to get bread for metal?
I know I wouldn’t sell you mine at any price: I can’t eat metal.
Basically, I’m starting to reconsider whether silver is a prudent prepay all. Perhaps money is better spent on beans, bullets, and bugout land.
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On the other hand, if you purchased silver as an insurance-based commodity for the purchase or barter for goods and services, then the jury is still out.
1. The commodities markets are rigged/controlled so they aren't acting normally.
2. Everyone I follow says that when the demand for physical silver gets too large (i.e. as inflation continues to rise) then the price will skyrocket quickly.
3. The spot price isn't the true price...go try to buy physical silver...the TRUE price is closer to $40 for a silver eagle. The "premium" cost keeps rising (as it should).
4. Bitcoin and all these fake investments have (in the short term) delayed the rise in value of metals. People are dumping fiat due to inflation, it's just they went to bitcoin instead of silver/gold. This is a great opportunity to keep buying (in moderation...silver/gold are part of a diversified prep plan, including food, lead, etc as you pointed out).
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Reminds me of that scene from John Wayne's "Chisum"
"Did you bring any gold"
"No"
"Silver?"
"No, just lead"
"Ah well, lead can't get you anything in these parts. I guess I'll just have to kill you and take your horses"
(https://tse3.mm.bing.net/th/id/OIP.vgpidSjDhEFn4Ac5avy06gAAAA?w=164&h=299&c=7&r=0&o=5&dpr=1.25&pid=1.7)
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…On the other hand, if you purchased silver as an insurance-based commodity for the purchase or barter for goods and services, then the jury is still out. Like carrying a life insurance policy, you have bet against yourself, and may have been buying silver for 20+ years with no benefit to show for it (or paying 30% premiums if buying it today). The decades go by, and my worthless fiat currency still buys bread at the store. But if it couldn’t, would people who have bread still give it to me for metal? …
Basically, I’m starting to reconsider whether silver is a prudent prepay all. Perhaps money is better spent on beans, bullets, and bugout land.
I think of silver as a small hedge during the transition when fiat is crashing, but daily commodities are still available at a high price.
Not that one should ever barter ammo, but it is interesting how prices are 200% to 500% of what they were. For example: 2 years ago you could buy a 500rd. case of Wolf steel in 7.62x39 or 6.5 Grendel for about $110, just checking ammoseek.com, those cases will cost about $330. .300BLK has always been over-priced, but 60¢/rd subsonic is now $2-3/rd. You could previously get 9mm brass case reloadable ammo at about 15¢/rd, but even "remanufactured" (old brass reloads) now costs twice that.
We recently discovered weevils in our pasta stash. Decided to replace it with vacuum-packed sealed cans. Also we have had a couple of mylar-packed bags of "new crop" rice with weevils.
Don't forget seeds!
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Jєωs manipulate gold, silver, digital currency. Its all mammon. Unless there is a Catholic monarch (who actually sees to it that money issue is free of fraud, manipulation, usury, and the usual tricks of Jєωs), than it’s bound to be a tool for Jєωιѕн power. Tally sticks were probably one of the closest currency to something free of fraud/manipulation. I think they were issued during the reign of a Catholic King (would need to double check). Along with gold coins that was not being manipulated by banksters.
Sadly most Catholic monarchs fell to usurpers themselves to finance their own ambitions.
Maybe gold and silver will bounce back, I have some as a hedge. But I don’t count on it.
I think when the bombs start falling no amount of preps will compare to the Rosary.
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*usurers
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Once they allowed the JMFs to trade cryptocurrency as ETFs, the writing was on the wall that crypto would be manipulated to their benefit and our misfortune.
It's getting harder day by day to fight off the aphorism: "every.single.time"
Yes, the Rosary!
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Basically, I’m starting to reconsider whether silver is a prudent prepay all. Perhaps money is better spent on beans, bullets, and bugout land.
Silver/gold is only a good idea to park your excess "wealth" -- after you bought all those more important things. Energy security (solar panels, solar hot water heater, rain catchment/water storage tanks, professionally installed pond on your acreage, acreage, sheds, equipment for gardening/raising animals, etc.
And of course preps, and any home improvements. Do all that stuff first, and if you have cash sitting around left over, then yes you want to park it in something less vulnerable than USD.
But I will say this: most of us will never get that far: what to spend our "extra" on, where to park our excess liquid wealth. Many of us have none.
BTW, yes you can still spend your fiat currency for bread, but have you noticed the loss of value? Every possible thing you look at, the USD has lost about 50% of its value over the past 4 years or so. It's horrible.
We just bought a new dishwasher to replace one we bought in 2017 that just died. Same dishwasher, about 50% higher sticker price. Amazing.
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Silver/gold is only a good idea to park your excess "wealth" -- after you bought all those more important things. Energy security (solar panels, solar hot water heater, rain catchment/water storage tanks, professionally installed pond on your acreage, acreage, sheds, equipment for gardening/raising animals, etc.
And of course preps, and any home improvements. Do all that stuff first, and if you have cash sitting around left over, then yes you want to park it in something less vulnerable than USD.
But I will say this: most of us will never get that far: what to spend our "extra" on, where to park our excess liquid wealth. Many of us have none.
BTW, yes you can still spend your fiat currency for bread, but have you noticed the loss of value? Every possible thing you look at, the USD has lost about 50% of its value over the past 4 years or so. It's horrible.
We just bought a new dishwasher to replace one we bought in 2017 that just died. Same dishwasher, about 50% higher sticker price. Amazing.
Not only do our dollars buy less, but what they do buy seems smaller: Beer bottles went from 12oz to a stealthy 11.2oz; chip bags have more wrapper and less content (family sized bags today are the regular sized bags of yesterday); grocery bags are the size of lunch bags to hide the shrinkage; hamburgers shrunk, and look what happened to Ding Dongs:
https://kffm.com/new-hostess-ding-dongs/
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I've avoided gold/silver for this very reason. They've been deliberately suppressing their value, and if in a SHTF scenario, nobody's going to give up anything of real value for some metal.
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I've avoided gold/silver for this very reason. They've been deliberately suppressing their value, and if in a SHTF scenario, nobody's going to give up anything of real value for some metal.
All true. Peter Lynch said that doctors would invest in computer or tech stocks, and computer people would invest in medical stocks, when they should have been investing in what they knew. It's the grass is greener in the other side of the hill. My experience with inflation and how to handle it comes from working in hyper-inflation countries like Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Nicaragua, what people did in those countries was just keep enough money in their currency to live like 1 month, and the rest was in the USA or Europe. Real estate, gold and stocks, were not liquid, meaning you could not turn them into cash quickly. Keep your money in another country was the answer. BUT, that is of no use to us, we live in the country where they kept their money.
The #1 solution to hyper-inflation and inflation is to have a business or job that just adjusts with inflation. That does not help people on fixed incomes, but it is the best solution. We were in the steel business in the late 1970's when the price of our raw material (scrap rebar) fell by 50% almost overnight. We had to swallow the loss in the sale of what we had produced, and then buy at the new price and move on. It was hyper-inflation in reverse. It could have gone the other way, prices doubling after we had already bought at the cheaper price, and we would have made a mint. That's a business that adjusts with inflation.
As far as keeping extra money, I would put it in what I know. For instance Mark79 mentioned ammunition, which he says he knows, and is something people will always need. If that is what he knows maybe he would have bought certain calibers that are like commodities. I was involved once in a perfume business. I had $60,000 worth of top of the line ladies perfumes in my house closet. I was shocked to see that it occupied like an area of only 3'x3'x3' in my closet.
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Not only do our dollars buy less, but what they do buy seems smaller: Beer bottles went from 12oz to a stealthy 11.2oz; chip bags have more wrapper and less content (family sized bags today are the regular sized bags of yesterday); grocery bags are the size of lunch bags to hide the shrinkage; hamburgers shrunk, and look what happened to Ding Dongs:
https://kffm.com/new-hostess-ding-dongs/
Try and find 1 pound packages of bacon. It seems there are now only 12 oz in a pound. Hot dogs? There are now 8 in a dozen. A case of ammo was 1,000 rds. Now many "cases" are just 200 rds. At Whole Foods I see breakfast cereal in packages of 3.5 oz.! What a (((joke))).
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…For instance Mark79 mentioned ammunition, which he says he knows, and is something people will always need. If that is what he knows maybe he would have bought certain calibers that are like commodities. …
Who could be adequately prepared in that regard? :cowboy:
I do not envision bartering or selling it. By the time ammo is that valuable a commodity, the last thing in the world you want is for "the other guy" to have ammo that he will likely use against you.
I would not barter with any stranger unless I was in Level IV body armor had overwatch from at least two different vantage points.
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My wife one day brought home Log Cabin Maple Syrup which is not even maple syrup it is corn syrup and at that time I think it was high fructose corn syrup which is even worse. I asked why she didn't buy the real maple syrup that we always had, and she said the price had gone way up. I didn't have the syrup that day but I watched the children and my wife submerge their pancakes in syrup and when they were done there was like 1/4 inch of syrup on the bottom of each plate. They could have all had second portions with just what was left in one of their plates. I showed my wife and the children what I had observed and told them that we could have real maple syrup for the price of the Log cabin counterfeit, if they would not waste their syrup. MY wife got real Maple Syrup again. Did the same with Orange Juice.
Bottom line: people need to learn how to save money because it does not grow on trees anymore. It will be a very difficult journey for most people here in the USA.
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Who could be adequately prepared in that regard? :cowboy:
I do not envision bartering or selling it. By the time ammo is that valuable a commodity, the last thing in the world you want is for "the other guy" to have ammo that he will likely use against you.
I would not barter with any stranger unless I was in Level IV body armor had overwatch from at least two different vantage points.
It was an example, there are problems with anything valuable, like say one's wallet. One just has to learn how to deal with whatever the problem is. Besides I was talking about extra money, and how it is better in an inflationary environment to have it in say bullets or perfume (if that is what someone knows) than in paper money. One does not have to be concerned with inflation on their paper money, if they have instead hard assets, like bullets and perfume (or if you owe $100,000 on your house mortgage )
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The delta between physical and paper/fake silver says it is not a mistake at all and this decoupling was one of the more alarming things in the last few years. I hope no one here has paper/fake silver.
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Basically, I’m starting to reconsider whether silver is a prudent prepay all. Perhaps money is better spent on beans, bullets, and bugout land.
Whenever any disaster or emergency happens, one of the first things that needs to happen is finding someone that is calm, level-headed, knowledgeable, capable and able to take charge of the situation and be the leader. (Yes cholerics or sanguine/cholerics, I am talking to you as first up to the plate).
It will not matter what kind of stocks or bonds, or silver or gold, or bullets, or what-not you have if you don't have a good and capable leader. It may be a man, or a woman, depending on many things and factors. ***Every married man's wife should know how to lead.***They should be able to lead their own family at least, and to be able to assist with helping other mothers with children, elderly neighbours, etc., but they should also be able to RATIONALLY and CALMLY be able to direct others, reduce fear, and get the job done.
They cannot be afraid of "getting their feewings hurt," (sarc).
That leader had better be able to triage and assess the situation in a heartbeat IF you want to survive, or increase your odds of doing so. One of the first things you do in any emergency is always scene assessment. If there are downed power lines and you all go rushing into to pick up a kid, it could end up making things worse.
Your money would be better spent as time and energy expended in getting fit if you are the father of a family, and getting all your family fit enough (or farm fit) to deal with things like sandbagging, carrying each other/dragging each other across the yard, etc. Practice drills with them, and take turns doing piggy backs and see how far they go before they tire out, etc.
When it comes right down to it, if a person is not an asset, they are a liability, period. So you need to find a way to reduce your liabilities and assets. When SHTF, the ones that will end up in trouble first will be the ones that cannot run, walk, or otherwise be self-mobile, because they are bed-bound, in a wheelchair, have dementia, etc. There needs to be an evacuation plan or strategy in place for the order of evacuation and assisting persons, whether it is at your own home or elsewhere. You will have to decide if charity begins and stays at home, or how much you are willing to sacrifice to help others outside your immediate home. If you are the father of a family, your first justice is owed to your family, of course, but as Catholics, we are also bound to help others.
****If a man is not physically fit, he is in the liability category until he is fit.**** He needs to be able to pick-up and carry his pregnant wife, or 2 or 3 of his kids at once and carry them to safety, that kind of thing. Older kids need to be able to help the younger ones, and so on. But Dad has to figure out a plan for his family for the immediate scene. Otherwise nothing else will matter and no amount of guns or bullets will do any good either.
Your team is only as strong as the weakest member on it. Think shows like "Survivor." Not advocating the show, per se, but the IDEA behind it. Practice different scenarios or take your kids and older girls if you have them to do things like swing baseball bats in batting cages, rope climbing, going through tunnels and "scary places." Screaming kids, squealers and yellers will not only waste precious time, but will give away your position if you are in winter and sounds carry for miles and miles.
And if a man is over 50 and not fit, then he has to add in the extra issues and challenges that come with ageing (reduced stamina, etc.) He needs to ask himself utterly brutal and realistic questions like, "How many flights of stairs could I make it running, walking, or dragging my wife/mother/daughter if I had to?" "When will we decide who gets left behind? Will I tell my family to flee, or do we all die together?" That kind of thing. "What happens when I am injured? Can my wife actually take over in the moment, or will she fall to pieces and we all die?"
A calm and honest mind will be like gold. A frazzled and fearful anxious mind will be like a lead balloon. Self-control is the secret weapon. Cheers, Anne.
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It was an example, there are problems with anything valuable, like say one's wallet. One just has to learn how to deal with whatever the problem is. Besides I was talking about extra money, and how it is better in an inflationary environment to have it in say bullets or perfume (if that is what someone knows) than in paper money. One does not have to be concerned with inflation on their paper money, if they have instead hard assets, like bullets and perfume (or if you owe $100,000 on your house mortgage )
Lad put is most succinctly: "…nobody's going to give up anything of real value for some metal" [or paper].
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Whenever any disaster or emergency happens, one of the first things that needs to happen is finding someone that is calm, level-headed, knowledgeable, capable and able to take charge of the situation and be the leader. …[lots of good stuff snipped only for brevity]… A calm and honest mind will be like gold. A frazzled and fearful anxious mind will be like a lead balloon. Self-control is the secret weapon. Cheers, Anne.
That was quite succinct in covering such important points. In toto, your post triggered [pun intended] a few aphorisms.
"The mind is the weapon, not the gun."
"Beware the man with one gun; he knows how to use it."
There is also "the lucky shot" phenomenon. An anecdote: Way back in the 20th century there was an annual international shooting competition held in Las Vegas limited to about 300 competitors. The night before the match there was always a shooters' meeting at which the rules and safety procedure were laid out in no uncertain terms. Afterwards we all went our ways. In the morning one of the shooters did not show. Later we found out that, after the shooters' meeting, he went downtown, got in beef over a hooker, and got shot dead by a pimp. Even the worst shooter at the match was more proficient than any 10,000 typical cops (seriously, even the SWAT guys didn't usually place as well as you'd expect for guys who get free ammo and plenty of paid time to practice—except the Dept of Energy's SWAT guys, the ones who guard nuclear reactors and weapons. Delta and HRT never competed as a team as far as I know) and that very proficient guy got himself permanently plugged and planted by the proverbial "lucky shot" of some clown.
"Never under-estimate ‘the other guy.'"
There are some folks here that I dearly wish were my neighbors. Sadly, one of my friends here recently returned to MN. Oh well. MN's gain.
Back to "the mind," I have been impressed by the analytics of this group: https://forwardobserver.com/
(https://forwardobserver.com/)I recommend their Early Warning Report. They'll email you a sample if you are interested.
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We just bought a new dishwasher to replace one we bought in 2017 that just died. Same dishwasher, about 50% higher sticker price. Amazing.
Only 4.5 to 5 years old. What brand and model? (So I know to avoid that junk in the future)
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Gold is the money of kings, silver is the money of gentlemen, barter is the money of peasants and debt is the money of slaves.