Although I agree that you should build up your stores of practical goods first, gold has its uses.

Physical gold, unlike most other goods, is highly portable and universally valued. If you need to flee the country quickly (during Nazi regime, Russian pogroms, Cultural Revolution, Japanese internment), you can store enough gold in the seams of your clothing to restart your life in another country.

the word for gold in maori (new zealand) roughly translates to "Shiny worthless object that white people like"

I think gold has value in a semi-apocalypse - where things are bad enough that banks and dollars aren't worth much, but good enough that there are still stores and trade. Seems like a pretty unlikely scenario to me.

Here's a more likely one: massive devaluation of the USD, combined with capital control laws that make it difficult for Americans to avoid the USD by investing in foreign markets & currencies. Then gold has use as a stable alternative to the dollar. This is basically the Zimbabwe scenario.

Yeah, I'm sure I'd pay a lot of attention to that order!

Unless it was preceded by registration of the sale of physical gold, I don't think it would be a problem :).

I am in the same boat as you are. The gold I own is paper gold GLD.

I wonder if casino/poker room deposit boxes are as likely to be seized as bank deposit boxes. I doubt it. Probably a lot more privacy, too.

Wow. That is about as good a piece on gold I have ever read. And my feelings exactly.

Power and Water (and Transit) are the heart of government.

If I had the cash to blow I'd get a shipping container full of generators and stick them in safe place that was cheap. I'd also set aside a couple of commercial grade water filter systems

You know, it occurs to me that given there's a creek running not far behind my house I might be able to get an even cheaper minor hedge against disaster in the form of some nice compact water filter.

> -just my two (copper) cents

I think you mean zinc.

I doubt we would see another gold confiscation order a la FDR. He did it because there was a run on gold from the treasury and he was preparing to raise the (governmentally-fixed) price from $20.67 an ounce to $35.something. So he wanted to get all the gold back before devaluing everbody else's dollars. It also wasn't strict confiscation, you were just required to cash out for dollars and holding currency gold (i.e. other than jewelry and flatware) became illegal.

Since gold prices currently float, I don't see that the government has the same kind of incentive for a massive confiscation effort. And banks don't keep inventories of deposit boxes (and typically give you a privacy room so the teller can't even see the contents), so they'd have to drill the locks of every box to search them (unless you believe they keep the code or spare keys for the customer locks, but then why do they drill them if you lose your keys?). Not an insurmountable obstacle, but it seems unlikely to me.

Downsides of storing physical gold include the "need" to insure it. Your bank tries to protect, but I believe does not insure, the contents of your vault. Even if your homeower's policy covered it, which it almost certainly doesn't, it would have a terribly low limit without an explicit rider (my renter's policy limit is $300 for precious metals). But your insurance company is gone anyway in the apocalypse, so insurance is only useful for the more likely (but still pretty unlikely) bank-gets-robbed-completely-unrelated-to-apocalypse scenario. That insurance cost is built in to the fees of paper gold like GLD.

I've been thinking about getting some gold bullion for my safebox, mostly as an apocalyptic hedge in the case of it sneaking up on me before I have time to stockpile all the other stuff people have been talking about (food, water, guns, ammo, fuel, generators). I live in an apartment without much storage, so stockpiling is tricky. But if I have some gold, I've got a chance of buying some black market goods. It would also let me eventually come out of the other side of the bread lines with some value still stored.

I should really do more research before continuing with this comment here and looking stupid, but someone will probably correct me or add detail. I believe Russia at one point experienced a scenario where the state basically took over all (only rental?) property, and wherever you had previously been living became "yours". No more buying, selling, or moving. Not that I think that is particularly likely to come to pass here, but given some historical precedent it's worth considering. At least I like my apartment, even if I'd rather be in a house (for many reasons including stockpiling ability). Yet now is still not an appropriate time to buy in the areas of San Diego that hold my attention.

It's been a long time since gold and silver were "Real Money"

Geez, I don't feel that old.

Maybe it depends more on how you define "a long time". I don't consider 40 years that long at all, especially in the context of economic history.

Buying the gold in the form of jewelry has a few advantages:
- Has a use beyond value storage
- Less likely to be confiscated (either by government, or crossing borders), much less likely to raise suspicions
- Probably easier to insure
- Gold alloys are more durable
- more blingy

There's certainly a price premium, but some jewelry stores sell gold jewelry by the ounce/purity at only a small premium over market prices for bullion.

:)

Agreed. So what is the threat model? What are the most likely catastrophes we should be trying to protect against?

Buffet got terms on his bank shares that I can't get, sadly.

thinking about the hillbillies who will appropriate the gold in Ft. Knox.

As for all the gold in Calfornia, it's in a bank in the middle of Beverly Hills, in somebody else's name.