spot on intelligencer, im 19 and am fairly new to silver. Im constantly amazed at the amount of friends and family members who are completely oblivious to pm's. my parants seem to think that im wasting money and should be investing in property (which i cant afford) or putting money into super (seriously?) yet they seem to ignore the fact that ive so far nearly doubled my money buying bullion
There's a lot of pro-property investors here as well. For my 2 cents, you made the right choice. Avoid debt, buy metal = win.
Unless your debt is good debt, ie it gives you cashflow so you can make re-payments, live comfortably and buy PM's with the rest (a la Robert Kiyosaki). Just hard to get into that position right now.
Investors should be willing to be pro anything (within reason) - otherwise you miss out some golden oppurtunities. My best investments have quite often been ones that I wasn't thinking about specifically but considered when they presented themselves. If you automatically say "I am a .......... investor" you can potentially be missing out on some good stuff. malachii
Considering he's 19 only, I think establishing a savings ethic atm would be a priority - especially with such an uncertain market. The credit market atm is no place for the faint of heart of amateur investor, especially now!
i personally love the way buying PM works. it's like buying stuff but it's actually saving stuff! sure the market in silver and gold moves about but it stays pretty much ahead of price rises in the most urgent consumer goods (we are now seeing the price rise that hit gold, then silver, now it's rice and wheat and corn and potatoes) sure you can't eat gold in a famine but when the shortage of food is caused by inflation and not so much by overall reduction in production the gold and silver mean you can buy food where with the cash the inflexibility of wage controls means at some point there is gonna be really nasty pressure on food supply. i dunno if we have 'price gouging' laws here, my guess is, probably, i go into the supermarket today and half the vegetable section is empty...
Yeh i totally agree with this I guess once your comfortable with PM's and kinda understand investments enough you can start to look and read about other types of investments (just take a look at some of the guys on youtube who are happy with their PM positions and look at diversifying) I think though some of the best points of PM's is that 1. You can get into PM's in a decent way without getting into debt, you buy what you can and dont buy when you cant (no monthly repayments that you must bust your ass for to afford just to even get your feet wet) 2. You can get back your investment pretty quickly but not so quickly that there isnt some level of forced savings. When you want to liquidate a portion of your PM you would usually ask do i really need this 'X' and in most cases if you dont really need 'X' you just dont sell your PM and hence save yourself from another fruitless purchase 3. You can touch your investment, whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, for the new investor being able to touch what you bought, flip it around in your hand and talk about it on youtube (*LOL*) is a great thing and once your in PM's no doubt as you try to learn more about investing you will slowly become a more informed investor in other areas, good way to get your feet wet 4. Its almost impossible for your investment to go to zero and if by some far of chance a meteor from space hits the earth laden with trillions of dollars worth of gold and silver which is evenly spread amongst the citizens of this earth, you ATLEAST have a paper weight or a door stop thats more then you can say for a stock in a company that goes bust
Although a bullish long-term stacker, I have found along the way there is another benefit. Like some others, I sometimes struggle with the discipline of saving. The net result is I used to wind up trading my fiat (which represented my working effort) for trash that depreciated and was, in effect, a liability. Since becoming a stacker, my "spending urge" has been more focussed on silver, and this has effectively become my method of saving. There's little point in trading physical in the short term, but I must admit it was handy to have some to fall back on over the holiday season. I know it goes up and down, and doesn't come with all the perceived security of a bank, but my 2008 super (managed by 2 different companies) wasn't exactly a solid investment either....
yep, same deal for me. i had not much trouble running a free-form savings plan to pay for a $1900 body piercing course, but that money goes in and you would have to handle the glare of shame to pull that back out. silver i pulled off about 800 saved in about 3 months, probably close to the same rate overall, the body piercing plan took me about 5 months to put together. helps a lot having a job of course, now i'm out of work for over two weeks i have had to liquidate to continue bearing with this total non-happening brisbane job market. going to head east in fact, everyone's gonna have a slowdown now but at least the redlands hasn't had a mismanaged flood mitigation plan go haywire.
Good job being 11% up, I haven't found anything so far so I have just held on to the monies for the time being. I have a few areas that i think might do well but bit risky and if the risk is more then what im comfortable with ill just hold onto cash till another silver opportunity comes.
loki, I would take every single fiat dollar any government wants to give me. They are ones destroying everyone's wealth through inflation. For me, I would take their fiat and convert is to pms. Beat them at their own game. No apathy for me, just pms thank you. And if the government wants to pay for the purchase of some of my pms, then thank you very much.
If you believe that hyperinflation is coming soon, then debt is your friend, especially if you can buy with little to no down payment. A fixed-rate debt becomes worthless in hyperinflation. So whatever real value the asset has is obtained at a very low cost. I was unable to sell my house, because it is on a busy street. My back up plan is to rent the house. To my surprise, it will be cash flow positive on the rent. As US inflation goes up, so will my rent income. However, my mortgage payment will stay the same. My mistake was putting 20% down when I purchased the house. I did so because I did not want to pay mortgage insurance. But as long as the real value of the house in several years, exceeds the current real value of my 20% down payment, I have gained. I expect to make at least 200% on the investment. And to the extent that the rent money exceeds my note payment, those extra fiat dollars will go towards buying pms.
i think this is the case too. borrow to get in on the silver, at worst it's collateral, at best, even in moderate inflation of 10%+ which is not far away, by SGS figures we are already hovering around 6-8%, the debt will be a piece of cake to pay off. i really can't see how this inflationary process of the fed buying its' own debts at zero percent interest can do anything but ultimately lead to an out of control upward motion in the price structure for primary capital goods, PMs, food, water, fuel. if the rate of interest on the unsecured credit is 15% and the rate of inflation goes over 15% the real cost of paying down that debt is heading towards asymptotic.
Yeh this is true , just gotta be sure not to pull the trigger to early, high inflation or hyperinflation is most likely the END outcome but dont forget the bumps in the road on the way there. In Australia interest rates are going up and they may continue to do so for a while. What it will do is cleanse out all the weak hands that have debt or that are over leveraged and cause a contraction. We dont know what interest rates will go up to but you dont want to get yourself over leveraged cause you may not make it to the happy days of PM's sky rocketing if the repo man comes and takes your belongings when you cant make your credit card payments. Housing bubble (if you believe there is one) hasnt popped yet so we still have that to worry about too. Well it does reduce their debt, so in terms of debt whats good for the gov is good for us And think about the gov's options 1- Let interest rates rise (probably best thing to do, best for recovery, encourage savings however painful medicine) After living so many years at the top of the world, best cars, best army, best weapons, best everything would you let it all go and spiral into civil unrest and anarchy (which could last for a few years ?) Imagine what interest rates of say 6% would do in a debt fueled society ?! its like a nuclear detonation on the economy 2- Print the crap out of the currency and take the rest of the world with you down into oblivion. Remember that if you manage to keep inflation at High inflation and not hyper inflation the economy will be functioning as normal just things will be more expensive , as PM and property holders we will be laughing ,our debts would be reduced cause we got our debts before the inflationary period. However for the poor, the ones that are poor now, dont know about PM's it will be a living hell. Literally they wont be able to afford anything So as a government do you protect the asset holders ? The ones that contribute to the economy or the poor, the ones that feed of the tax payers money ? As bad as it sounds im sure the governments favour the former over the latter. I think this is why in the eyes of the powerful men such as Ben Bernanke inflation is favoured over deflation (specially if they can manage to get it to sit on High inflation). Also think if the BIGGEST spender of the entire world can no longer buy anything cause they are in a massive deflationary period who are the producing countries gonna sell their stuff too ? Hence is the reason why this debt fueled living may go on for a while still. If US is allowed to deflate all producing countries will also have a decline in income. So in actual fact deflation is kind of bad for everyone, specially if your at the epicenter of the economy. If we got into hyper inflation well, who knows what will happen there ! That would be anyones guess
If you are in the US, ok. But I reckon that anyone in Australia who does this is pretty gutsy. Does anyone believe that Australia will see hyperinflation in the next few years? (i.e. inflation > 50% p.a.)
practically every fiat currency and 'partially commodity backed' currency ever has eventually got to hyperinflation. the us dollar has got as high as 40% monthly inflation for very short periods before but i don't think we've ever had quite such a profligate government in the whole of USA history as the one we have now. if anyone can start hyperinflation it's imperator benron the bernank.
hyperinflation is more than 50% p/a. i think it's regarded as hyperinflation when it gets to 50% per month. edit: it's basically when they can't print enough money to keep up with the shrinking of the economy.
Thats right, i mean as we speak now we are contracting and it seems this will happen first prior to any sort of inflation. If you think hyper inflation will set in , in Australia in the next few years .... well ..... yeh ..... gutsy
one of the key elements of hyperinflation's causation is a total loss of faith in the banking institutions and government money management. both ingredients are well and truly in the pot now, in the USA 2/3 of government spending is borrowed money and they literally WILL default if they don't raise their debt ceiling but honestly, what kind of retard lender would lend them any more money. see what i mean? our government is better at keeping these things under wraps, for example, in case you didn't know, ANZ and Westpac in 2008's crash borrowed billions from the Fed. i believe westpac specifically borrowed 2.87Bn. do you think the fed will lend another 10Bn or so whatever it takes to keep the big 4 awash with liquidity? you betcha. you think that's gonna do anything for the credibility and faith in our banks here in australia? i think it should be instructive in the press releases and public statements the queensland government is telling us not to hoard food supplies...
