Your Survival Guy

Preparing your investments and family for when disaster strikes.

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How I Built My Survival Cache. It’s Never Too Late to Start Building Yours

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This piece from May 17, 2016 is worth revisiting, and some of my new readers haven’t seen it. Use this as a guide for developing your own survival cache.

No one likes to lose money. That’s why when I started building my survival cache over ten-years ago I started with gold.

Back then, I spent little time (same as I do today) worrying about where I felt the short-term price of gold was headed. What I wanted to do was build a physical hedge for my cash.

Cash is king! Try selling that one to your spouse. But cash is pretty powerful. You never know when you’ll need it. Like when there’s a Wi-Fi outage that shuts-down businesses. No Wi-Fi, no credit cards. No Pizza. Cash is powerful to an empty stomach.

But predicting an outage is as fruitless as predicting the future price of gold. And unfortunately over time, your cash gets weaker and weaker the longer it sits around the house collecting dust. It’s pretty lazy.

So, I didn’t want to just take out a pile of cash, lock it up and know I was losing money every year for the rest of my life. Yes, inflation is low. Wait a minute. Hold on. No one told that to folks at our local farmers market, where they sell a carton of a free-range eggs laid by stress free chickens that have never been told “no” in their life. Or to the folks at Kerrygold and their grass fed butter (it’s worth every penny).

What I set-out to do was to create a 50/50 hedge for any gold/cash storage. For example, ten years ago I wanted $5,000 cash so I matched it with a purchase of $5,000 worth of gold.

The idea being that with my cash and gold collecting dust, I wanted to at least have a chance to win the war against my lazy cash. And I did. Both are still collecting dust.

It’s a simple strategy no doubt. But it has worked for me. The key is not to buy the gold for appreciation. If you do it will drop by half the next day. It’s simply an unwritten law of investing.

Think about it as a way to be your own banker. All your cash is backed up in your safe with gold.

You become your own government.  Your own gold standard. The ruler of your kingdom. That is until the next farmer’s market.

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E.J. Smith - Your Survival Guy

E.J. Smith is Founder of YourSurvivalGuy.com, Managing Director at Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd., a Managing Editor of Richardcyoung.com, and Editor-in-Chief of Youngresearch.com. His focus at all times is on preparing clients and readers for “Times Like These.” E.J. graduated from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with a B.S. in finance and investments. In 1995, E.J. began his investment career at Fidelity Investments in Boston before joining Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd. in 1998. E.J. has trained at Sig Sauer Academy in Epping, NH. His first drum set was a 5-piece Slingerland with Zildjians. He grew-up worshiping Neil Peart (RIP) of the band Rush, and loves the song Tom Sawyer—the name of his family’s boat, a Grady-White Canyon 306. He grew up in Mattapoisett, MA, an idyllic small town on the water near Cape Cod. He spends time in Newport, RI and Bartlett, NH—both as far away from Wall Street as one could mentally get. The Newport office is on a quiet, tree lined street not far from the harbor and the log cabin in Bartlett, NH, the “Live Free or Die” state, sits on the edge of the White Mountain National Forest. He enjoys spending time in Key West and Paris. Please get in touch with E.J. at ejsmith@yoursurvivalguy.com