How Long Before You Moved Into Gold?

I started with gold,but then,gold was $600/oz. when I started.

I also started somewhere around August and bought my first AGE shortly there after. I buy ASE and AGE for investments. I buy Pandas, Koalas, Kookaburras and Britannias for their beauty and as collections and look at their silver value as a bonus.

Still stacking silver, so no gold yet and maybe never. We'll see. Silver seems to have a much bigger upside potential than does gold but maybe that's just my perception. Anyway, my stack just went over 1400 oz., thanks to getting 75 silver Maples and 80 ASEs within the past month, and a small baggie of 90% US coins just the other day.

My reasons for stacking silver are many but chief among them is that they will make great barter items at some point if Bernanke and the US Gov continue to cheapen US currency. The Fed has a history of catching on to an economic problem too late, cutting interest rates too low, and then holding them there for too long. Then, they sit around at their FOMC meetings, scratching their heads and wondering what is causing all these confounded financial bubbles. Well, DUH!

While watching some You Tube videos last month, I came across a documentary that was made about life in Zimbabwe and how very difficult it has become to live there. It told a story of MANY people in that failed country grubbing for a few tiny flakes of gold. Some were digging, some were panning, and some had a sluice box set up and running. In all cases, the goal was to recover 0.3 grams of gold per family per day. That is what it takes to continue living there. People also had gardens wherever possible and were growing lots of vegetables and some chickens.

I thought about what this video was telling us and came up with thew following:

1) 0.3 gram of gold @ $1700/oz = about $16
2) Silver was at about $32/oz. then, so this is equal to 1/2 oz. of silver.
3) Bernanke and Geithner seem intent on using the Zimbabwe method of currency
management and could very well have the same result.
4) There are 8 people in my family, including me, my wife, our two kids, and 2
grand kids. In a similar survival situation, we would need 1/2 oz. of silver
per day to buy food. If bad times last for 3 years, that amounts to about
550 ozs. and more if hard times last longer than 3 years. Additionally, the
cost of living in the US is considerably higher than in Zimbabwe, so there
could be a 2-3x multiplier in there to compensate for that.
5) Because of the above, a minimum stack for us should be 2,000
ozs. and this is just for food. Other bills could add to this, so another
500-1000 oz. of silver could be needed to cover these expenses.

@ ED

Nice breakdown. Scary when you cruntch the numbers and think about what might or could be huh.

Haven't started buying any gold yet, riding the silver train for a while. Once I get comfortable with the roller coaster ride that comes with PMs I think I'll put on my big boy pants ;)

I collected a little growing up, just pocket change from the adults. When the 1984 Olympic coins came out, I got the three coins. That was my first commemorative coins and my first gold coin

Indeed so, Sam... and the real heck of it is, a lot of this is just a best guess approach to answering a very difficult question without a lot of data to back it up. Since a lot of this involves the future, which is both unknown and unknowable, making some educated guesses is about all we really can do. It would be great if there was some way to make this much more accurate but there does not seem to be such a method. Instead, I am thinking that it would be a lot easier to have less than we need than more than we need, so will be stacking as long as I can.

I do want to own some gold at some point, though... spendy as it is.



Yes, WHOA, indeed.

Another calc I tried showed that we would need about 4700 ozs. to support the 8 of us for 3 years. That is a LOT of shiny stuff! Don't know if I can manage that or not, thanks to other expenses.

The good news is that we are shopping for a nice 5-10 acre place in the country where it will be possible to have a LARGE garden, fruit and nut trees, poplar trees for firewood, some chickens, and some rabbits. Hopefully, a neighbor will have some cows and grain and we can do some trading to fill in any gaps that we both may have. If so, then we would need less silver for buying food.

I did not include my parents in this evaluation. Both would be most welcome, of course, but they are in their mid-80s now and not in the best of health.