A very common question for people who are getting started with preparedness and changing to a more self-reliant lifestyle goes something like this…I’ve only got $X. I know that I need to stock up on food, and I should probably have some gold & silver on hand, but what should I get first?
It’s a great question and most people screw this one up massively. (I did) I’ve found it effective to look at buying survival/preparedness supplies like Maslov’s heirarchy of needs. If you satisfy a high level need like love before you satisfy hunger and thirst, you’re not going to last long.
Similarly, there is a hierarchy of survival needs.
With Limited funds, this will help you determine what to buy first.
It’s a work in progress and if you have any thoughts, comments, or refinements, please comment below. Right now, though, we’re going to address food, and precious metals.
I’ll start by saying that gold and silver are a great way to store/transport wealth and to protect yourself against the devaluation of the dollar (inflation). But the key phrase here is “store wealth.” In order to store wealth, you’ve got to have “wealth” in the first place.
If we check in with Webster, we see that the definition of wealth is “The abundance of valuable material posessions or resources” or “abundant supply”.
It would stand to reason that you probably don’t have “wealth” to store until you have an abundance of basic survival items on hand…particularly food and water.
What I mean is that if you don’t have food on hand to last for an extended period of time, why would you buy silver or gold? Fast forward with me for a second and picture yourself in a survival situation.
You’ve stored up lots of silver and gold…now what? You can’t eat it. You can’t start a fire with it. You can’t drink it. You can only use it to trade for other goods, and to do that you have to find someone with excess food and disclose the fact that you have gold/silver to trade.
Everyone that you approach about a possible trade is going to remember you as the person who has gold/silver. This is obviously not good from an OpSec perspective.
The longer you go without food or water, the more of your gold and silver you’re going to be willing to give up. People will instinctually understand your desperate situation and realize just how much leverage they have over you.
The fact is, you can use your food storage to trade for other goods just like you can with gold or silver…but if you need to, you can always consume it. Put another way, in a survival situation, you will NEED food, but you won’t NEED silver or gold.
There’s a common joke among people who don’t like gold. They say that gold won’t be useful because when you’re hungry, you won’t be able to find anyone with 1000 loaves of bread to trade for your ounce of gold. This is true…and it makes my point. If the person with the gold had prepared differently, they would have enough food and the gold would simply be a way to store their excess wealth.
Now this all gets much more complicated if you have to bug out and space/weight are a big issue. In this case, you may want to take a few ounces of gold/silver instead of several additional pounds of food, but you still have to find someone with EXTRA food who actually WANTS your silver or gold in order to make it worth carrying.
So, am I against precious metals? Absolutely not. I fully support buying gold and silver…just at the right time.
So when should you start buying gold and silver?
There is no hard and fast answer, and the answer is going to depend on a number of factors, including your mobility, storage space, number of caches set up, the size/maturity of your mutual aid group, and more. Everyone is going to have a different guideline, but I will suggest this…I wouldn’t buy gold and silver until you have food, water, fire, shelter, medications, trauma gear, and tools for self defense sufficient to survive a breakdown in civil order lasting a month or more. Even then, I would suggest spending most of your money on core survival items and a portion on gold and silver.
What are your thoughts on this? Let me know by posting your comments below.
UrbanSurvivalPlayingCards.com update! We got our most recent shipment of cards in on Thursday and they are SWEET. About 1/2 of them are getting shipped out today to people who back-ordered them, but that means that we have just over 500 decks available. If they don’t sell out by the end of the weekend, we MAY even be able to start fulfilling wholesale requests. If you’re interested in selling the cards in a retail location, or at gun shows, send an email to
wholesale@surviveinplace.com and we’ll get you information on pricing and quantities.
To find out more about the cards and to get yours, please visit UrbanSurvivalPlayingCards.com
Ever get an email forwarded to you about guns or pending regulation that seems to be written specifically to make you angry? Ever question if the content is even true? Well, after getting literally hundreds of false emails forwarded to me on fake firearms laws, impending imaginary liberal legislation, and declaring guns on your 2010 tax return, I decided to start posting them (and whether or not they’re true) on the forum so that you would have an easy place to go to fact check them. I just posted the first one…on removing “In God We Trust” from our coinage. You can read about it and comment by going here:
http://urbansurvivalplan.com/members...php?f=32&t=215
Until next week, God Bless!
David Morris
UrbanSurvivalGuide.com/SurviveInPlace.com
UrbanSurvivalPlayingCards.com
SecretsOfUrbanSurvival.com
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