The Ninth Circus? Really? That Benitez guy is gonna be the patron saint of Ballistic-Americans at the rate he’s going. The meme AR lowers are sure to be out next week.
(CNN)A federal judge overturned California’s longtime ban on assault weapons on Friday in a ruling that likened the AR-15 to a Swiss Army knife.
First, some definitions –
conflate – combine (two or more texts, ideas, etc.) into one. Example: conflating clip and magazine when they clearly are not the same thing.
As I sometimes mention market investments, and then segue into things like metals and tangibles, people bring up ‘preserving wealth’. And then they go on to say that [xxxx] is a bad investment. Ya gotta keep in mind, investment is not the same as wealth preservaiton, broadly speaking.
I have $2000 cash in my hands. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that $2000 will buy me six months worth of groceries…or gasoline….or health insurance. As inflation works its erosive magic, the price of things go up. Next year, that $2000 buys me only five months of groceries, gas, or insurance. So, I need my $2000 to suddenly have the buying power of $2400, since it now takes $2400 to buy what $2000 bought last year. How can I do that?
Really, only one of two ways: either take the $2000 cash and ‘put it to work’ in such a way that in a year it is $2400. Investing is one way to do that. So is gambling. So is buying something for $2000 and trying to sell it for $2400 next year. Or buying something for $2000, renting it for $33 a month for a year, and then having $2000 and $400 worth of rental income. You get the idea. As inflation rises, you’ve gotta hit that blackjack table for higher and higher wins in order to purchase the same amount of goods as you did last year. Inflation is a sneaky bugger.
Plan B is to take the $2000 and turn it into something that will, very broadly speaking, always be worth what you paid for it across different currencies. Meaning: $2000 of gold today, buys what $2000 of cash will buy today next year. It ‘held its value’. There’s a very well-traveled (why doesn’t traveled have two L’s???) ‘fact’ about how a hundred years ago an ounce of gold would buy you [a new suit/a Colt pistol/etc.] and how an ounce of gold today would buy you those same things, thereby proving that gold ‘retains its value’ over time. I think there’s some truth to that, but it’s not a sure thing.
I invest in the market. When I want my money to make money, to grow, I go to the market. The market has never hit zero, and so far it has always bounced back from whatever the crisis du jour was. Does that mean it’ll never go to zero? Of course not. It just means that I have enough belief in the unlikeliness of a market-destroying event that I’m comfortable investing in it. However, I am not comfortable enough to put all my eggs in one basket. For some people, the idea of ‘letting it ride in the market’ is akin to betting it all on black at the roulette table. For some, their idea of investing is something like real estate or a vending machine business or something that puts their money (capital) in one place and it makes money by collecting rent or sales revenue. Thats great, and I do that too… but, honestly, I’d rather spend three hours a week on my keyboard with a brokerage wesbite than chase tenants and customers for money. But..suspenders-n-belt….I do both. I don’t buy gold/silver to increase a value, I buy it to retain a value…
I invest in the market, but I keep my critical money in in metals, property, tangibles, and some cash (even though the cash loses a bit to inflation I find it is pretty necessary to have a certain amount of liquidity in case things come up that require money in a hurry. I’m willing to expose some money to inflation by just having it sit in the bank for convenience.) As I’ve gotten older and more deliberate in financial matters, I know how much I need to keep inviolate and how much I can ‘play’ with and expose to various degrees of risk. If the market crashed to zero, today, right now, would it wipe me out? Nope. Would it hurt? Oh heck yeah. But I’d still have property, precious metals, food, guns, some cash, and, of course, mans basic survival tool. I’d take a hit alright, but I wouldn’t lose my lifestyle…I’d still have a house, hot water, a vehicle, electricity, and food. I wouldn’t have to start from zero.
I mention all of this because, as I said, it seems like when I drift into this topic many people conflate investing with wealth preservation. Investing adds to your purchase power, preserving keeps it at the current level. Big difference..especially in strategy and tactics.
Look, you will never, ever, ever go wrong by having ‘too much’ money. I hate to use that term because it implies that there is a ‘good’ amount of money to have and beyond that is simply ‘extra’. Thats the thinking of Bernie Sanders and his fellow travelers. But, broadly, when in doubt…add to your stack of cash/gold/property/investments.
I’m a cautious person, with some bad experiences, a fierce sense of self-preservation, a little bit of head-knowledge, and access to the internet….and it is my personal opinion that, yeah, we’re heading for inflation, maybe stagflation, and you can’t go wrong by being too ready for it. Weimar-esque inflation? Seems possible, of course, but I think it’s unlikely. I think what you’ll see is a drifting towards the economic situation we saw in the Carter years…maybe not a full-Carter economy, but certainly leaning towards it.
If I were a fixed-income type, living off pensions and that sort of thing, I’d probably very slowly start moving what I could towards inflation-resistant forms like metals while trying not to dip into principal to deeply. If reported inflation starts ticking up consistently I might want to think about accelerating things a bit. But thats me. You do you, man.
Anyway.. investments /= wealth preservation. The two are different enough that they call for different strategies and ways of thinking. Don’t conflate the two. Thats my inflation-adjusted $.02 worth.
ETA: If you want a dramatized but rather plausible (IMHO) of how inflation upsets your apple cart, pick up a copy of this book.
Just busy with personal stuff. Gimme a day or so to get back on an even keel.
I looked for it but couldn’t the post I had about the tags I use for fuel cans. So…let’s do that again.
Here’s the thing: I store my fuel cans outside. Usually under some type of cover, but always outside. Since I try to rotate fuel on a fairly regular basis, I need to know when a particular can of fuel was filled. Any written paper tags would disintegrate from moisture, plastic tags would crack and fade from sun and UV, chalk marks are wildly temporary, and that really leaves only one option – metal tags.
Here’s what I do. It works for me, it might work for you. YMMV.
Tools and materials:
I cut up a pop can and get myself a piece of aluminum about 1″x2″. Pick a size that works for you.
Put the aluminum flat on a firm but somewhat yielding surface…a piece of wood, a phone book, etc. Using the pointy object, scrive the date into the soft aluminum. Punch a hole in the tag youve just created and loop the paracord through it.
Tie tag onto fuel can.
End of story.
I’m sure someone is going to say “I just write the date on a piece of duct tape with a Sharpie and slap it on the gas can. Works fine because I keep my fuel cans in a garage/shed/bunker/etc.” Well yay for you. Thing is, you don’t know with absolute certainty those cans will always be in that sheltered location until such time as you use them. You may have to hurriedly heave them in the back of your truck at 3am on some rainy night, or leave them sitting in the snow for a few hours as you shuttle them to another location, or you may have to store them outside for some reason. Point is, to my way of thinking it makes sense to plan around the more-worse case scenarios. I keep my gas cans as covered and protected as possible…but the real world has a way of throwing a monkey wrench into plans…so, for me: metal date tags that are impervious to sun,UV, moisture, snow, etc. And, yeah, I could ziptie them to the gas cans but then we’re bag to the UV/sun/freezing damage that occurs to plastics…paracord works for me although a true suspenders-and-a-belt guy will use a twist of wire to affix the tags to the can.
This has been your DIY tip for the week.
Y’know, it’s not easy to open up a new post in WordPress and come up with something worth writing. (This, of course, flatters myself because it presumes that stuff up to this point has been worth writing.) Yet, here we are….so, let’s see what vaguely surivival-oriented topic we can beat to a slow death today.
Since it’s a three day weekend for me, I have an extra day to try and get stuff done that I normally would not have a chance to get at during the week. So what am I doing, mostly just regular household chores. But, in the midst of all that I had a Zoom call with someone and we were discussing guns. I mentioned that, by and large, I’ve really hit the point where I don’t really need more guns. Oh, there’s stuff I want…no doubt. But if the apocalypse happened today? Yeah, I’d be orders of magnitude past ‘just fine’.
The interesting thing is, that didn’t happen on purpose. Oh, it did in the sense that I didn’t somehow pick up dozens of guns without knowing it. It just means that for most of my gun-acquiring years there was no real set plan. It was only a few years back that I came up with the Magic Number of what I wanted. By then it was a pretty simple thing to round off what I already had and pretty much close out the Must Have For TEOTWAWKI list.
Whats worth noting here is that up to a certain point, I was taking a very undisciplined approach towards gun buying…see gun, buy gun. Without a specific idea of what I wanted, how many I wanted, etc, there was no real goalpost to run towards. It wasnt until after I set a goal that I was able to achieve gun-nirvana and say “Ok, done.”
I know it sounds like self-improvement BS, but it really is true: if you want to actually achieve a goal you need to follow the criteria of how to set it. Just saying “I wanna …..” isn’t enough. Here’s a short description of how, ideally, you should set goals.
And, as it turns out, it’s true. I had some very loose financial goals and I never seemed to hit them. Starting in late 2019 I opened up a spreadsheet, marked off 12 columns with one month in each, and started keeping track of exactly how much I was trying to achieve and I was progressing at it. And…I hit all my yearly goals early. Way early. I’m not saying that to brag, I’m saying that because I found something that works for me and it may very well work for you if you’re having trouble hitting your goals.
Whether the goal is five AR’s in the safe by Christmas, six months of food in storage by Thanksgiving, or a new-to-you truck by next summer, try setting your goals in a more concrete manner as outlined above. Worst thing that happens is you don’t make progress any better than you are now.
As an aside, my goals at the moment are:
We shall see how it goes. The next couple years will be full of opportunity for savvy and bold people. Sad but true, opportunities come from bad times and other peoples bad fortune. :::shrug::: Circle of life, baby. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to take advantage of some things (the coming magazine bans, for example) to achieve my goals. We’ll see. In the meantime don’t just say what your goals are…get it into a spreadsheet or something, in a quantifiable and recordable manner, and start making incremental progress.
“The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.” -Will Rogers
I was going to pay my property taxes the other day and I could not find the stupid second half of the property tax bill. As you know, property tax bills usually come as a binary sort of thing….you make one payment for around half the total, and six months later you make the other half. Then, six months after that, .gov comes back and starts the whole thuggish cycle over again.
So, I was looking and looking and looking…no success. Finally I said ‘screw it’ and went online to look up how much to send to the weasels at the county courthouse. “PAID IN FULL”….huh….and then I remembered: I did well enough last year that I decided to pay the entire tax bill at once. Yay me.
I started wondering – if a period of great economic upheaval occurs..inflation, high unemployment, wage and price controls, shortages, etc…gov is still gonna demand their pound of flesh. And when you are jobless, foodless, and cashless is the worst time to lose your house to some local .gov that insists it get paid even when it’s doing nothing but serving (and saving) itself.
Obviously, the thing to do would be to have enough money in he bank to pay the property taxes for a couple years. But here’s the problem with that…if the economy craps the bed enough that you’re without a job, hungry, and subject to the ravages of inflation, that money in the safe isn’t going to keep pace with your taxes which the .gov will conveniently adjust for inflation. And suddenly that stack of $100 bills in the safe that you thought would cover your property taxes won’t even buy you a new pair of shoes (assuming the stores still have shoes.) So what’s a savvy survivalist to do? Well, I suppose you can hope that in such a crisis things will be chaotic enough that property tax collection will be the last thing on .gov’s mind as it valiantly throws beleaguered police and National Guardsman into the fray of rioters, looters, demonstrators, criminals, and anarchists. Mmmm maybe. Or I can try to hedge my bets and have something to sell for the inflated currency necessary to pay the taxes.
And then I thought about the gold. Hmmm. I should have thought of this before. Keep a couple years of property taxes handy in gold. That way if inflation heads to the moon, it’ll take gold with it. In other words, two ounces of gold pays my property taxes now, and in Weimar-town two ounces of gold still pays my taxes. (Assuming that the tax rate remains the same. Obviously in a crisis .gov is going to raise taxes, so perhaps a little extra gold just in case.)
The more I think about this, the more I like the idea.
Kind of a question and answer all in one photo:
By the way, it’s surprisingly difficult to take a picture of gold. The lighting has to be just right or you get hellacious glare.
I really don’t believe there’ll be a time when we’re trading gold and silver in the burned-out rubble of WalMart for cans of out-of-date food. And I’m somewhat sure that a bout of Weimaresque hyperinflation isn’t coming. (Although history has shown that a world war does wonders for economies…maybe we’ve got something coming up against the Russians/Chinese.) And it isn’t really a great investment since it’s returns are lowest among pretty much any investment. (And, yes, gold really isn’t an investment as much as it is a store of wealth. There’s a big difference there.)
But, for some reason, it makes me feel better having it. Like the shelves full of #10 cans of freezedried food, the cases of AR’s, the rack of full fuel cans, etc. It just makes me feel calmer, even though I intellectually know that my odds of needing them are rather slim. But…that could just be the normalcy bias talking.
But, as I said, it makes me feel safer and calm……Which, I suppose, is all the justification I need for what I do.
Anyway, a portion of whatever I have available after the bills are paid goes to metals, some to investments, some to cash, etc. I picked these little generic 1/10ths the other day and they’re just too pretty not to take a picture of.
Alright, I’ve seen just about every form of survivalist/postapocalypse movie known to man….and probably the most under-represented genre (probably for the best anyway) is survivalist romance. (You might think a post-apocalypse musical would be the most under-represented…you’d be…close.) And yet, I seem to have missed this:
I suppose the message given in the movie is that if you worry too much about the future you wind up missing out on the benefits of the present. At least, thats what the grasshopper would say. Nonetheless, I may have to go fire up the Netflix/Prime and see if I can snag this for some night when there’s nothing better to watch. John Lithgow, I think, is a good talent and I’d be interested to see how if he brings something to the role that couldn’t be accomplished by any other actor his age.
Then again, given Hollywood’s attitude, at the end ofthe movie the guy could have an epiphany, burn all his preps, and think he’d wasted all his time and money on foolishness. I’ll just have to watch and find out, I suppose.
So….that happened……..
No, not the Glock, ya goober. I figured I had passed my finals and graduated but I wasn’t going to be certain until I got the stupid diploma in the mail. And….there ya go. I guess it’s time to go get the grownup job now. (Which, as it turns out, wasn’t nearly as difficult to find as I thought.)
For those of you who are curious, its a Bachelors of Science in Amateur Gynecology with a minor in Lingerie Stress-testing. Exams were tough but the practical course was fun.
It’s the weekend. Time to head up to the Co’s for shopping. (WinCo and CostCo)
I’m pretty well off on food right now so I just ‘top off’ what i’ve used over the previous week, but even if I don’t have more than a handful of items on my shopping list I still take my time and hit every aisle? Why? Because I want to see for myself whats going on in terms of demand, pricing, and availability. Are the natives restless and stripping the stores of toilet paper? Has the price of chicken really gone up as much as the news has warned? Are the strategic canned good disappearing? Are the home canning and food storage items strangely absent? That sort of thing.
I’ve believed for the last twenty years that the apocalypse was going to choose the form of some sort of economic issue…a global depression, massive inflation, or most likely a return to the Carteresque 1970’s. But…thinking ahead….what followed Carter? The great recovery after Reagan took office. And that, mi amigos, was an interesting time to be alive.
Not only do I need to be ready, just in case, for an upcoming economic downturn…I also need to be ready to capitalize on it so that when it finally comes to an end (and they all do, eventually) I can come out the other side stronger than ever.But, of course, the priority is on being able to get through the dang thing first.
What sort of opportunities might arise? Most notably, I’m curious to see what happens to the currently red-hot real estate market. If interest rates ever go back up that might slow down the house buying frenzy and prices might start to drop. And if the interest rates go to where they were during the tail end Carter’s reign, which was somewhere in the 14-16% range, I’d imagine things would really cool down. (BTW, the highest rate I’m seeing was around 18% in 1982 which was one year into Reagans term..by the time he left office, though, it had dropped to 10%.) My house is paid for, so mortgage interest rates only affect me in the sense that they make selling the house easier/harder as buyers demand increases/decreases. But since I’ve no intention of selling, it’s moot. I do, however, have intentions of buying and a 2008 style of real estate crash would really help my plans along.
But, before I can think about using a crisis to my advantage I have to, y’know, make sure it doesn’t leave me as part of the wreckage by the side of the road. So….off to the Co’s.
