Lengthy feature article on preppers in the wilds of Idaho.

HAYDEN, Idaho – Don and Jonna Bradway recently cashed out of the stock market and invested in gold and silver. They have stockpiled food and ammunition in the event of a total economic collapse or some other calamity commonly known around here as “The End of the World As We Know It” or “SHTF” – the day something hits the fan.

“I’m not paranoid, I’m really not,” said Bradway, 68, a cheerful Army veteran with a bushy handlebar moustache who favours Hawaiian shirts. “But we’re prepared. Anybody who knows us knows that Don and Jonna are prepared if and when it hits the fan.”

The Bradways are among the vanguard moving to an area of the Pacific Northwest known as the American Redoubt, a term coined in 2011 by survivalist author and blogger James Wesley, Rawles (the comma is deliberate) to describe a settlement of the God-fearing in a lightly populated territory that includes Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and the eastern parts of Washington and Oregon.

Although there are politics discussed in the article, please keep the politics out of this thread

Link to the rest of the article.

What is there to discuss? We all place ourselves somewhere on the preparedness spectrum, a personal lifestyle choice, and carry on. I worry more about (and prepare for) fires, power outages, burglaries and earthquakes, rather than society's total collapse. I lurk on some "SHTF" sites just for grins, amused at the simplistic scenarios that don't reflect historical reality (IMHO). I guess these folks don't remember the late 60s and early 70s.

Everyone needs a hobby to keep them off the streets and out of trouble...

But if society collapses, I don´t think gold and silver will be to any use. Only thing that will have a value is food, ammunition,hygiene stuff etc.

The reasons they give for expecting society to collapse are laughable. And if it did they'd be the first to die now everyone knows where theres people with supplies for it.
qjs

One only has to look at the example of Yugoslavia, which went from a beautiful, modern country hosting the winter Olympics in 1984, to a country, which in less than a decade, was divided and destroyed by civil war resulting from political, economic, and ethnic strife.

Yugoslavia fell apart because of ethnic tensions. The USA has a mainly white population, with plenty of every other race, but elected a black president and governors and congressmen from every other race.

The USA is the proof they are wrong to racists everywhere. It's the worlds melting pot and the most successful nation.
Not much sign of an imminent race war there.

qjs

But in such a instance, you are way beter of by getting out the country quickly than trying to stick it out. Sometimes having the money to move quickly and have little that tie you to a certain location is way better than having lots of stuff in once location.

Can these preppers survive historical situations? Real situations that have happened? Could they survive the breakdown of Yugoslavia if they were transported back in time? If you transport them to ISIS-held territory in Iraq or Syria, can they survive ISIS?

Many "total societal collapse" preppers seem to have something more akin to homesteading in mind. "How to survive long term in the wilderness without the benefit of civilization" sort of thing. Make sure to have a cache of small arms and ammo to fight off the obligatory band of three bad guys you see in the movies! Nobody is thinking about a well-equipped modern army that has no scruples about killing you. There is a reason that war zones often produce a lot of refugees.

That statement tells me they are not very smart preppers. Wasting all their money, tieing it up in bling-bling speculation when they could have used it to buy something that would actually be useful. Gold and silver might be worthwhile investments (might!) if you were in a functional society, that had currency, that was based on the gold and silver standards. Or if you expected such a society to re-emerge out of the ashes quickly after the SHTF.

But I thought they were prepping for when that society had collapsed and was no longer in place. They might as well have invested all their money in Barbie clothes and accessories.

IMO, gold and silver should never be regarded as investments, they pay no income or dividend and carry the small but real risk of loss by fire, theft or accident.
The value of gold or silver may go down as well as up if compared to paper money, land, or other investments.

Despite this I still favour a modest supply of precious metals, but this should be regarded as a disaster prep or as insurance against an uncertain future and NEVER as an investment.

In an absolutely total collapse I doubt that anyone would want your gold, it has almost no practical uses in a post apocalyptic world.

If however the collapse was not absolutely total, then gold would almost certainly retain some value, it has always retained some value in the past, why would next time be different?
A good example would be the various wars, conflicts and other troubles in parts of eastern Europe. Gold was sought after and those who had some bartered it for food, fuel, ammunition and other supplies.

The main merits of gold are portability, non perishability, and that governments cant print more of it.

I get the vibe from most 'survivalists' that they're hoping on some level for society to fail. Most are poorly socialized and on the social and economic fringes of society to begin with. IMHO it's wish fulfillment fantasy unmoored from reality. Of course, it's a sliding scale and a slippery slope; where does prudence segue into paranoia?

+1

I take a sticky fingers approach to both gold & silver. I don't go out & buy any. If I do happen to acquire some (inherited or finding pre 1965 silver coins), it gets put away.

I'm reluctant to consider these "preppers", and think that "homestead survivalists" is a more accurate description. And, personal peeve, am getting tired of being lumped in with the doomsday crowd.

From where I've been standing, prepping is a lifestyle choice of taking the normal precautions (smoke detectors, spare tires, etc.) and adds onto them to cover the less common, but more severe incidents. The end goal is being able to handle things on your own instead of getting caught flat footed and having to rely on an already overburden emergency management system.

I'm not particularly optimistic about our current way of life continuing much longer, but have no desire to be at ground zero when things finally have to shake out.

???

Have you ever tried to carry it? It's not exactly lightweight. One of the last things I'd want in my backpack. Right up there with Mercury and Uranium.

A gold bar is 12.4 kg (27.3 lbs). It's worth over half a million USD currently. Is that heavier or lighter than the same amount of money in bills?

According to some guy on the internet who seems to have done the calculation with a bit of care, a million dollars in $100 bills are around 20 lbs. (See "joe" in https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090718165259AA6Xvwc) Half of that is 10 lbs.

So if you're bugging out on foot with half a million dollars, try to fill your backpack with Benjamins -- this is assuming US currency is stable. I'd make sure to include some small bills in case I run into a soda machine.

However, a gold bar allows you to plunk it down on a banker's desk with a great deal of drama. If you're a Nazi hunter or something, you can make a bigger statement with a gold brick than with a suitcase of money.

Some conspiracy theorists believe that aliens use gold as fuel for their spaceships, and they genetically engineered mankind to covet gold so we can find more of it for them. (We're sort of like truffle pigs, but for gold.) If the "end of the world as we know it" situation involves alien invasion, it's hard to say whether the gold would be of benefit. Maybe they'll reward you for filling up their gas tank. Or maybe they'll just take your gold and eat you -- hmmm, survivalist tartare!

Strikes me as unlikely. If we assume alien invasion, we probably can assume spacecraft. It's much easier to mine gold from asteroids than from our planet.

But super funny .

God is portable in the amounts that most us are likely to possess. Many thousands of £/$ are easily carried. High denomination paper money is lighter still, and a bank card weighs almost nothing, but the whole point of gold is for situations when paper money or banks are, or are likely to become valueless.

If you are lucky enough to have millions of dollars worth of gold, then you would reasonably have a vehicle or pack animal to move it.

And yes I have carried a modest stash of gold. 10 UK modern sovereigns worth in total about £2,500 fitted readily into a pocket. Dozens of those coins, worth say £10,000 could have been carried without much trouble.

The problem with gold is that you

The problem than become, how do you trade gold to something you can use? First of all, I and most people don't have much idea how much a gold or silver coin will be worth, without looking it up. And looking up would be to check the value in money term. But if money is worthless, then how much is gold worth? Besides, me as a simple guy and not a gold expert. How do I tell the difference between a real gold coin and a 'replica' from china. And how do you give back a form of change? I mean buying a chicken with a £/$250 gold coin seams a but problematic...

I can see how gold/silver can work if you need to move from a country in distress to a safe country. Currency of a country in economic disaster will be worthless, but gold will be valueable to exchange in a country where the economic system will be working.

Go get yourself a Kewpie doll. Fleeing a country that's in the middle of an economic collapse is the biggest valid reason to switch from fiat money to gold or other intrinsically valuable materials. There are no more backed currencies. Everything is fiat money nowadays. But, a Kg of gold or platinum is enough to tide you over for a couple of months while setting up in a new country.


There was another thread on trade goods that also touched on this.
http://forums.equipped.org/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=280408&page=1

Yeah, I think you're right. It's hard to see how one can buy groceries with little bits of gold. It seems to me gold is good for stuff like bribing border guards.

Does anyone have a study on how gold is used in wartime?

Look to Venezuela for contemporary coping with this sort of problem - 700 per cent inflation means you will soon need a wheelbarrow to carry the cash to buy a loaf of bread....

Lucky me...I could carry all the money I own in the form of gold and it wouldn't be heavy at all!

I'm with you. I wouldn't want a Grand Marquis in my backpack or any other Mercury.

Jeanette Isabelle

For that last, consider these combibars. That's 50g of gold in a bar roughly the size and shape of a credit card, pre-scored into 50 1g pieces. Each piece is worth around $40 at today's prices. The idea is that you break off as many pieces as you need for the transaction. Maybe it doesn't go down to a single chicken, but $40 for groceries isn't bad.

As for not knowing how much it is worth today; well, today you don't need to know. If things do go sideways, then people will always want to trade, and barter can only get you so far. That's when people will figure it out. Gold has been used as currency for millennia. There's a reason for that, and the same reasons make it the first choice if things revert. Plus the very fact of that history gives gold an edge over other currencies. It's kinda the default choice.

The thing about gold is that it's relatively easy to assay. Especially in a standard format, like a coin or a bar. You measure its size accurately with callipers, measure its weight, and then either compare that with known good values or else just figure out the density from scratch. It's hard to fake that because there aren't many other things as dense as gold. It's much easier to assay gold than diamonds or other gems, where you need to be an expert to evaluate the clarity, cut, purity and other factors.

I can envisage a few scenarios. The first is in the early stages, where people don't trust paper money but still hope the crisis will quickly pass. They may accept gold hoping they can sell it once things return to normal. It's better than trying to get them to take your wristwatch as payment. The second is when the crisis has persisted for long enough that new systems arise to cope. That's when shops become equipped with callipers and scales and the knowledge to use them.

Of course it is not for everyone. If you have limited funds to spend on preparedness, it's probably better to spend them on things you can use directly, rather than hope you can buy what you need later. If you do have funds, then keeping it all in a bank might lead to a nasty surprise one day. Keeping it in dollar bills stuffed under a mattress may turn out not to be ideal either. There's an argument for keeping maybe 10% of it in gold.

At least as planets go,Mercury is fairly light....

Announcing that one is cashing out of any market, investing in precious metals and moving to the hills is one thing for sure. .


-Likely to interest theives and murderers who see an easy mark.