Currency collapse, how to protect the value of your money?

johngalway

Not sure if this is the right forum for it or not but here goes...

I had a big post written out, then highlighted it to copy into another forum and accidentally pasted something else in it's place and couldn't Undo :clapper:

This comes from several threads I've been reading on several forums, and a chat I had with a friend today.

One thing I would like to be left out of this is the politics of the Euro, the EU, the UK, the ROI and any other country, start another thread for them please

The scenario is this. You have X amount of a currency which is in danger of collapse, let's say a few thousand. You want to convert that paper money into something tangible that after the **** hit's the fan that would have retained it's value through that messy transition.

We first talked of Gold, but I think gold is in a bubble at the moment. Too many are investing in it, it's like property was 10 years ago, sure the value can only go up (until Italy or some other large country dumps it's thousands of tons of gold onto the market to raise cash). We did agree that smaller value gold coins would be easier to dispose of post currency collapse than large value coins, better odds on people having small sums of money to spend than large. So Gold was ruled out.

Then we moved onto foreign currency. But, paper money is all about confidence, if a major world currency were to collapse that collapse would have major repercussions for economies all around the world, from those economies that make things like China, to consumer/service economies like the EU/USA. There is also the question of what type of limits, charges and taxes would be applied to foreign currency conversion post currency collapse, which could be punitive. I don't think foreign currency is as good a bet as is made out. So that was ruled out.

Farm land was mentioned, and I think there is some merit to that idea. Food can be grown, animals raised, allotments leased out, there are options there. But, there is a large problem in that land isn't always sold quickly if one needed to liquidate that asset and turn it into new currency paper money for any reason.

Two other suggestions were whiskey and ammunition. I don't believe whiskey would run short but it may retain it's value, I'm just not sure, it doesn't feel certain to me. Ammunition has the big problem of legality, one can only hold so many rounds in this jurisdiction, BUT, even with things going well importers are sometimes slow and there have been ammo shortages. I'd not like to have a house fire storing either!

We didn't settle on any item or items being a good idea to date. What we did agree was that lower to medium value items, which keep in good/perfect condition over time and are easily converted back into currency would be a good idea.

What would you think those items to be? That is the question