Curious What You All Think About The Price Of Silver.

Yesterday I went into a little shop and looked at their cull coin dishes. Dollars were $38, Walker halves $18. I felt no temptation to buy, though I considered pawing through them looking for better dates. Seemed like a lot of work.

Adding to my previous comment, my wife came home a couple months ago and said we should invest in silver. This must have come from a friend or coworker. I'm retired and she is getting close. As such, my interest in the topic centers on how anyone can have a steady income stream from doing this. My financial strategy has always been very simplistic and low-risk. You could put $100k into a 5 year CD currently earning 5.25% or so, and have a steady $438/mo coming in. Or you could currently buy 4167 ounces / 260 pounds of silver, but then what? Sell 18 ounces a month to get the same $438/mo income? The price is going to bounce around month to month, and there's no guarantee that you're 5.25% ahead or behind relative to when you bought it. Either way, after 5 years, regardless of whether you're net ahead or net behind, you're still going to have less silver. But when your CD expires, you still have your $100k. I don't get it. I guess the only way that works is if the silver you have left is still worth $100k. Way too risky for my tastes.

Metals are not the same as CD's. I could sell metals and buy CD's, but then I wouldn't have the store of value. In the 1990's a $10 pre 1933 gold eagle cull was worth $200 selling, now worth $1000 selling. Over 25 years that's a 7% annual appreciation, which can be liquidated at any time for cash. The $100,000 CD principal is still worth $100,000. The interest is taxable and it has to be sold at term to avoid early penalties. IMO tax free munis are a better play than CD's, but still not the same as metals.

Will metals continue to increase in value? IMO they will, as long as fiat currencies continue to decline in purchasing power.

Looking at it that way, the $100,000 CD has about $20,000 value left today in 1998 dollars. The gold has maintained the same value in 1998 dollars.

There is no guarantee that this wll continue. But it has continued this way since the 1970's. The biggest appreciation in gold was in the first years after Bretton Woods was abrogated in 1971. The price of gold rose 10x by 1981, from $40 to $400 an ounce. Then it went flat for 20 years, then started rising again. It's not a smooth steady rise, but I wish now that I had been in at $40. Silver isn't a lot different....I wish I had been in at $2 per ounce. Both of them have far outperformed putting paper dollars in a SD box. Governments are NOT good at preserving currency value based on "full faith and credit". They are not driven by any sense of fiscal responsibility.

For tax purposes, the government cannot track metals appreciation very easily. One can claim that they acquired their metals stack yesterday, and in an estate it's just another asset with a value at time of death.

Metals don't work like an annuity or a CD, throwing off monthly payments. They are a store of value, more like real estate, and they've worked best when held for decades. It takes a couple years just to overcome the buying commission.

Well that's the FOMO fear of missing out argument pushed with everything like this. Buy now before it's too late! Did you have any money 50+ years ago in 1972 to be dumping into silver instead of food, mortgage, heat and electricity? If I had $500k in 1991 I could have bought 10 bungalows in my town and I'd have $6 million in property now. The only problem with that is that I didn't have half a million dollars.

So I dug into silver a bit more. You could have piled it up for 7 years 1978-1985 at >$6/oz and then waited 18 years until 2003 until it went back above $6 again, unless you timed it just right at the 1987 spike. Or you could have piled it up for 5 years 2009-2014 above $18/oz and then been underwater for 6 years until the pandemic spike in 2020. One argument is always that you have to hold it long term. Well whose "long term" applies? Somebody who bought a ton of silver in 2011 is never getting their money back. If you can stomach that kind of thing, fine. Just not for me.

I settled my dad's estate in 2014. The real estate was a real pain to deal with, and I didn't feel like it did overly well. It constituted only about 10% of the value of the estate, but took 90% of the effort in settling it. Months of drudgery. He did phenomenally well with his royalty trusts, but those crashed within 6 months, and I was lucky to get out ahead of that. The effort to settle them was minimal, taking only a couple days. The coins were a miniscule part of the estate. But I learned that the gold had considerable value, and it was sold in 15 minutes. I also learned that modern proof sets are a drug on the market, unless they contained silver, but even then it was nominal value in comparison with the gold.

Back in 1970 all I could afford was to scrounge 90% dimes out of circulation. It took a while to accumulate a roll of them, which I sold shortly after. I might have made a dollar on that roll....

Did you know that one of the best "investments" ever in Numismatics Land is the 1909 Lincoln VDB? Had you bought a bag of these cents for face value, you would be billionaire now.

Yes. Bullion price is a good guide to selling if you've got really poor items with little numismatic value and you want to scrap or otherwise offload them, and that's about it, really. And we all know that we're not going to be able to buy anything at a lower price than bullion unless we're just giving scrap value (and some people even try that with decent coins, shame on them!)