Don’t have the money to buy gold in the first place, and still essentially with my parents still for college, so what can I do to prepare for what’s probably coming?
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Buy physical goods that you'll need in the future. Tools, appliances, spare parts, things that will still hold value even after your dollars lose value.
Stealing top comment to post this, hope it helps you all out.
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Tools can be had really cheap on eBay, supposedly because sellers can afford to buy variety packs and unbundle them. I try and look out for suspicious accounts that are just stealing the tools from Home Depot, but eBay leads the industry in anti-theft protection so that gives me peace of mind that I'm not buying from a theft ring.
I figure as long as it's not being shipped directly out of a city that's notorious for organized theft rings and they don't have a price tag on them, I've done all the due diligence I need to do. You can also buy Chinese stuff directly from their distributors, but you're rolling the dice on those.
build good relationships with your neighbors
that is free and quite possibly the number one thing you can do to increase your chances of survival
This makes sense but as a poor person with severe social anxiety, RIP
social anxiety is fake and gay and is just a liberal euphemism for being a pussy
stop being a pussy
I too had "social anxiety" until I forced myself to fix that shit. I still remember the first conversation I deliberately initiated with a stranger. On the bench in a courtroom, waiting for my name to be called to plead guilty to a traffic ticket. I turned to the guy next to me and said "What are you in for?" He told me speeding, I said seatbelt. Then he didn't say anything so I assumed he didn't want to talk, told him "good luck" he said "you to". Social skills can be learned to like any other.
My favorite tactic, larp as a spy. Your goal is to learn anything you can about the other person to bring back to your agency, your cover story is your real life.
This is true. I was neglected from the age of three to five and never learned to interact socially. I had to teach myself over my entire adult life, but it worked.
Everytime you avoid socializing because of "anxiety", you legitimize and internize it. Humans are social creatures, it's how our brains work, and if you don't socialize you will get depressed. You don't need protection from talking to people, you need to get brave enough to do the thing you're afraid of.
Start small by just being around people without talking to them. Ride the bus or spend time at the library. Practice making small talk with cashiers ("How are you today?"). Work your way up until you feel competent.
Personally, I still don't want to talk to people. It's a chore, like cleaning, that I can do, and needs to be done, but I have no desire to do it, even when I genuinely like the people in question. But it's how we work and you hide from others at your own peril.
That certainly beats buying shit you can't afford.
NFTs are gonna turn around this year I know it
Buy the dip!
i do that a lot... jalapeno chedder is too damn tasty, i think i might have a problem.
Physical goods like they say. Buy tools and learn valuable skills. Sure, it's fine to learn like "modern job" skills , I work an office job. On the side learn to do things that will always be valuable in society. Buy a gun and learn to shoot. I'm not even suggesting that ad like a defense mechanism. There's value in marksmanship skills and firearms.
That's my super ultimate fall back plan. Being able to use tools to fix things and build things has value in almost all of human history.
Learn survival skills, bushcraft, first aid and basic butchery.
If shit goes as South as I think it might with the left losing power and the money becoming increasingly worthless, you're safer in the wilderness than any urban area..
If you’re anywhere near a major population center of any kind, “wilderness survival skills” are gonna do fuck all. Tens of thousands of people will decimate any local game population in a matter of days.
idk... if they are willing to eat long pig it might still be useful...
I used to buy some silver every month until I got laid off. I need to get back into it.
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how does one even liquidate silver? there's a decent chance the dollar will collapse, but I don't see the world moving away from fiat currency anytime soon. It will just be replaced with the ruble or the Yuan or the Euro, or even the globalhomo digital currency.
if one tries to buy food at the supermarket with a gold or silver bar, they would be told to fuck off. even a farmers market won't accept what is essentially bartering. and even if there is a full collapse of society, people will be more interested in food and resources than silver.
Lethn is a brit, so probably can't buy survival goods and definitely can't buy the always valuable precious alloy called "ammo", made of lead, copper and brass.
Ammo is the best investment.
High longevity (if stored properly), tradable in discrete amounts, and immediately useful in most scenarios.
This is the second time Ive seen it today, I'm curious you're logic on being so insistent on bars. I tend to prefer coins if they don't come at too much of a price premium. They can be authenticated to a very high certainty by look and feel alone and come in various sizes for easy trade. It's not like whatever government minted them can decide later its not authentic after the fact.
Oh ok, I never buy old coins really and just stick to highly mainstream commodity grade coins, not collectible stuff. Although I do have some old 90% silver US coins, but those were just things I've acquired occasionally, and there are so many of those in existence they are a known commodity.
In theory, if what was going on was simply inflation then the price of labor would go up to compensate for the inflation. What we have isn't pure inflation, we have a dramatic reduction in quality of life due to poor management of our resources.
I'd recommend selling drugs, selling women, starting an assassins guild or something along those lines. Otherwise, there's not much you can do. Buckle up and enjoy a worse quality of life.
I can't tell if your recommendations are serious or not.
Naziboo recommending becoming a promoter of degeneracy and talking like an edgy teenager? Why am I not supprised.
Sorry what you should do is actually join a Nazi group, go to church and pray. That'll fix all your problems. Be sure to go up to every woman you see irl that is wearing pants and tell her she's sinning and should be wearing a skirt. That'll solve inflation.
Buy trust, respect, and have a needed skillset you can barter with. It can be car mechanic to organizational skills, so long as you do it well and have the trust and respect of others you can work well.
A trick I learned is to be everyone's friend. Learn to tell jokes and have a nice conversation. I've seen my dad stop a man from destroying his office by just being friendly and chatting. It's how I survived Seattle for so many years.
Learn other skills that you can do well enough that the basics are easily done. This includes cleaning, car stuff, organizing, yard work, and cooking. If you can prove you're not trying to be a freeloader, and could survive on your own with better circumstances, less people will complain.
Collect items you like. If you have extras, trade them for other stuff.
Physical goods and find any sort of side employment. I have insomnia to a degree so I do surveys and stuff online, work comic book conventions, flip things at yard sales, and house sit. Also books. If you have to go without tv and stuff you can find books super cheap.
hard assets. Either work to buy your own house, or work to help your parents maintain ownership of theirs. if your parents don't own a house, suggest pulling resources between the three of you to buy one.
also be sure to take care of your car, and keep an eye on the supply chain for food.
Buy a house.
Going to college? Buy a house near there. Staying put? Look for a place with good property prices, and buy a house there. Ideally in a "flyover state" where you might be able to pick up manual labor.
Rent and purchase are often the same monthly cost down the line, if you're willing to move about.
"Buy land, they're not making it anymore" was the key advice my economics professor told us, and it's still true now as it was back then.
A house is just a few walls and some plumbing and won't be worth shit if shit hits the fan. Buy a high security compound if that's where you want to put your money.
gold is sold out.
if you don't hold it isn't your and/or is not real.
hold stocks in us companys that pay dividends long positions are exempt from capitol gains tax for a time... but a better idea look at the third world for skills you can use such as recycling alluminum or other soft metals into useable products as you will be able to make more money doing this then just scrapping em for quick cash, and with the net you can expand your customer base making this a bit more viable. just look into what your using for what lead is bad for plates and eat ware after all.
edit if that dont appeal then hoard seed's and learn to grow a few simple things like tommatoes or potatoes if the economy goes depression food and water will be a priemium item you can sell for a sum. as for drinking water a solar still or boiling it and collecting the vapor can produce drinkable water.
Make yourself valuable, rather try and hold value in finances.
Another user pointed out buying tools and appliances, but you'll also want to invest in yourself to make the most of said things. One that some people might not think of (especially outside America) is also getting a gun and getting into hunting. Hunting your own meat can be a massive financial saving, though you'll need to invest in a decent sized freezer to be able to store the meat from the carcass, along with ensuring you know how to strip and prep the animal for all the various cuts.
Gold only holds value if it has a use. In a true collapse, nobody is going to give two shits about gold, because while it holds a modern use in electronics, most people won't be able to manufacture that in a collapse. What they are going to care about is food, goods and services that they can use.
There are a lot of resources out there about homesteading, and how to get the most output out of small areas. IIRC, an acre or so can provide for many with the right setup. And while you want to be independent, you don't need to be. Start small, start alleviating pressure. Don't try and do everything all at once, grow with your skills not with what you want. You over-expand and you'll burn yourself out. It's not so much a skill as it's trying to foster new habits. And I'm not going to pretend you'll have access to an acre of land, but you plan according to what you and your associates can manage. Your associates? As someone else pointed out, make friends with your neighbours. Get involved, and do simple things like swap excess produce. For example, if someone has room for chickens, and you have room for bees, swap eggs for honey. You grow tomatoes and they grow carrots? Swap 'em! Get involved, or build, a community. Get others involved, and get them motivated with you.
I know that I've posted a fair bit of information here, and it's easy to get bogged down. But the key points are to begin small, one step at a time and don't overwhelm yourself. You're still in college, so you don't have an excess of free time, so you'll be forced to start small. It's also good to find what works for you. Some things, like beekeeping, can also have some rules and regulations depending on nation (Australia for example used to be very strict (and still mostly are) since they were trying to keep out a rather dangerous mite that up until this year was virtually only ever seen at border control), so it's not terrible to look things up, but most will be fine.
Also, look into what is a necessity and what isn't. Things like gold and silver do have value, but they're not necessities. In a collapse, people can live without them. Sure, they might return as a form of currency, but that's just a representation of value and not value itself. Gold/Silver holds little usefulness outside of being a representation. Skills and needed goods (like food) inherently hold value as they are needed for life.
This is essentially taking up a new way of life. It doesn't need to be all at once. It doesn't even need to be all of it. You could simply find that you like growing a couple veggies and that's about it. Maybe you want some chickens and nothing else. These are things that can just take the load off and alleviate pressure because it's just one less cost. Or it could legitimately grow into a passion and you get more and more independent and self-sustaining as you get into more and more elements. You're free to pick and choose on your own schedule, and scale it as per your desires. And most importantly, have fun. This should be a way of life, and you can't be hating it. If you're not enjoying it, you need to look at something you will enjoy that will alleviate pressure.
A freezer and a side of beef is going to be a more valuable investment than almost anything you can buy right now.
Meat is a big thing to be able to have, and if you can hunt and fill a freezer, that can last a good few months just for yourself. If you can hunt and sell/barter/swap with others, that will be insanely valuable.
Freezers, and general meal prep, is a MAJOR cornerstone of any sort of frugal living and should always be incorporated into efforts at self-sustainability. There are going to be days you won't feel like doing much. There are going to be days when you're too busy. Not having to worry about your next meal alleviates a lot of pressure.
This is incredibly wrong. If gold was only valuable for its use in electronics, why were ancient civilizations using it? Gold ,and all precious metals, hold value because they....hold value. Thats it. They were the first forms of money for a reason. 1) Last a long time without degrading 2) Rare 3) Compact and thus easily held and traded. In a collapse I would question they're worth, because they really only work in a stable society that values "value". But it wouldnt hurt to have some anyway, not like the dollar is gonna be any better
Gold only held value due to the rarity as a stand-in for currency. That was it. It was used to represent value, but it itself was not valuable outside of it's rarity and limited status which allowed for it's value to remain relatively fixed due to a mostly static supply. New gold could be discovered, but rarely enough to truly alter its value. This is what gave gold it's value over other commodities. Most other goods were either in abundance or more could be made. Having a natural resource that couldn't be massively expanded resulted in a currency that maintained it value as per supply vs demand.
And currency of any kind is nothing more than a representation of value, often now associated with labour. That's why any Standard (most often idealised as the Gold Standard), where you tie something tangible to a currency (so as to not be fiat) is considered rather important by most economists that aren't blitheringly retarded.
Whew, that's some brilliant circular reasoning. Don't hurt yourself on that one.
My point is that investing your dollars into yourself (and those directly around you, eg family) is a far better investment long term than anything else. Gold is only valuable so far as someone else wants it. If nobody else wants it because it holds no actual usage for them, then your gold is worthless. A shiny and rare trinket to admire, sure, but no usage beyond that. I could just as easily buy an NFT and claim the same thing, but the reality is that NFTs could only hold value if there were people willing to buy them. And when it's getting to a situation where banks are starting to control more and more and more of how people spend, people aren't going to care about using gold, they're going to care about getting the things they need, like clothing, furniture, shelter, food, water, medicine, etc. A shiny metal that can be made into a ring or necklace isn't of much value when those are the priorities. And if you have the skills to be able to provide those things, you're going to be a very valuable person that won't struggle for much as a result.
Gold is a meme for faux-preppers that think they'll outlast a nuclear apocalypse but have no idea how to make a splint for a broken bone, couldn't grow a tomato to save their life, and thinks their 23 rifles are going to make them into the local warlord so they'll be fine. You wanna be prepared? Make yourself valuable. Doesn't matter if it's an apocalypse, economic downturn, or if things are going great. The more you invest in yourself, the more valuable you are. Don't be a low value person when you have the means to better yourself.
Grow your own food.
Get the most reliable vehicle you can afford that has good parts availability.
Mobility opens doors in terms of the job market, housing, or simply being able to flee a burning city on short notice.
A vehicle is a makeshift home in an emergency, with heating in winter time. It can also be a quick and dirty income source and even just being able to drive makes you more valuable to employers, neighbors, and potential allies in the wastelands.
Things that can be used for barter.
You can always buy cheap/free things from garage/estate sales etc and see if you can resell them for higher value. Just go there with facebook marketplace open and compare the prices. Keep in mind what you are seeing for sale are the prices that don't sell.
Invest in books/download pdf's where able and learn as much as you can.
As others have said, useful goods.
Normies may not even value gold right after everything goes to hell. It's an acquired taste.