There are many emergency situations where you may need to evacuate your home (Bug Out) or make some last minute purchases and the credit card/debit card system is not functioning.  In addition, it would not take long for all the cash in the ATM machines to be stripped clean.  This would leave you without a way to make emergency purchases like GAS…

(you are keeping your tank at least 75% full at all times, right)

So, you should always maintain a cash reserve in a safe place…

This is going to vary by individual, but at a minimum I would recommend you keep $300 in small bills (no larger than $20) on hand at all times for emergencies.  $500 or $1000 would be even better…

In addition, it is a smart idea to keep a $100 bill in your wallet for on-the-road emergencies.  Fold it up and tuck it far away in the wallet.  You may also want to keep a $100 bill in your car registration/insurance paperwork in your glove comaprtment…

Last but not least, your spouse and any children of driving age should also have this $100 bill hidden in their wallet/purse.  It is only for emergencies– and a new pair of shoes is NEVER an emergency.

And a roll of dimes and a roll of quarters in your glove box to make emergency phone calls at a pay phone (remember them) is another example of thinking ahead.  In an emergency, it very likely that cell phones will be overloaded or not functioning… (about half the payphones I see are $0.35 and the other half $0.50 so a roll of dimes and a roll of quarters helps at both price points).

For everyone that thinks that the worst of the Real Estate crash is over, go read this article…

Housing Crash to Resume on 7 Million Foreclosures, Amherst Says

Each of these 7 Million foreclosures will have two effects:

1. increase the supply of available houses by 1;
2. decrease the number of households looking to buy a home by 1; (at least til their credit is repaired) 

These two things create higher supply and lower demand which will almost certainly result in lower real estate prices.

Lower real estate prices could in turn lead to MORE FORECLOSURES in an classic negative feedack loop…

And every foreclosure is a LOSS to a bank or investor somewhere.  And the threat of bank failure and credit market freeze is what caused the global panic in the Fall of 2009.  The government is NOT in a strong position to bail out these banks going forward, we are already spending way more than we are collecting and the rest of the world grows tired of propping up the dollar…

AND…
The federal tax credit, worth $8,000, is presently propping up the market and making it possible for people without a reasonable down payment to get into a new house. This idiotic government redistribution scheme is thankfully set to expire at the end of November. That will make housing $8,000 more expensive for first-time buyers further reducing demand.

And…
If interest rates for mortgages should somehow rise from historic lows that we are presently enjoying into the 7%, 8%, 9%, 10%, and higher range then the resulting higher monthly mortgage payments will be a huge block to people trying to buy these homes.  Because the amount of house someone can afford at 10% interest is HALF what they can afford at 5% interest…

We are not out of the woods…

You can’t eat gold.

When it comes to survival, you need to have access to shelter, water, and food first.  And a way to defend what you have.

Having gold and silver saved to barter for necessary items WILL NOT do you much good in a natural disaster or in the early days of a financial panic, or terrorist attack.  You need to be able to survive on what you have available.

Gold is a fine way to store some of your wealth, but…

“Before you buy gold, buy what you’ll need the gold for.”

Hi…

Here is my second Library page here at “BuggingIn”.  It is about silver and I will be continuing to update and improve this page over time…

Here’s the link to the new page—> Survival Library: Silver For Survival…

Here is a link to a up-to-date silver price chart:

This website is NOT going to be all about precious metals- gold and silver- we are going to get to Food, Water and similar topics. Hang on…

Please let me know what you think of this information. Rob

This year, the Federal GOvernment is spending about $3 Trillion…

Since the Federal Government is just all of us US citizens all added together, and there are about 300 million of us this means that they are spending $10,000 for each man, woman and child in America.   So, for the average family of 4, the government has decided to spend $40,000…

Now the only way to collect this money is through taxes and even though we pay high taxes (at least the top 10% pays a lot of taxes) we are not paying enough to cover the spending that the government has decided is essential to spend on our behalf.  The amount of taxes collected is about $1.2 Trillion which is $4,000 for every man, woman and child in America ($16,000 for a family of four)

To recap, for a family of four:

They spend in our name $40,000
They collect in taxes from us $16,000
They borrow (deficit spending) from our future ability to spend $24,000…

So, even though Americans are getting rid of personal debts and credit cards at the fastest pace in history, the Federal government is borrowing on our behalf $24,000 each family THIS YEAR.  By the end of the next ten years, we will each be another $200,000 per family in further debt…

This is unsustainable. And the government has no good options to get out of the situation.  They can only confiscate so much wealth from the private sector– there is only so much productivity and income available.  If they try to cut back in any way on spending, interest groups howl because they want the money.  And they have the audacity to want to add even more huge bloated government programs on top of the ones that we already can’t afford.

We live in interesting times.

Hyper-inflation is caused when a government decides to print up a lot of new $100 bills to avoid the pain of having to pay for what it is spending.  For every new $100 bill that is created out of thin air, this reduces the value of all the other dollars in circulation.

Imagine that you have a rare mint baseball card and it is worth $1,000.  Now imagine that someone discovers a cache of previously unknown baseball cards all in mint condition.  They learn that 50,000 of the cards are the exact same one that you have and they are all in just as good of condition as yours… Your $1000 card is now worth maybe $10. 

The same thing happens with paper money.  The more there is, the less it is worth so prices for things go up.  Once they start going up rapidly as people trade their rapidly-devaluing dollrs for tangible things, then a hyper-inflation spiral can be the result.

Here is what happened in Zimbabwe in 2007-08:

They even created a trillion dollar bill during this crisis. Hyper-inflation puts the cost of many basic goods out of reach: in Zimbabwe a loaf of bread in 2008 costs what 12 new cars did in 1998.

The only ways to recover from the sort of deficit spending we are now engaged in is either default (the government tears up its obligations and doesn’t pay back the money that they borrowed) or hyper-inflation.  Neither of these options is pretty but this is the result of a country spending itself into bankruptcy.

The other choice is to stop borrowing more money and start paying it back before the interest rates go up and make it impossible to pay the interest every year.  But who thinks the politicians or the voters have the guts or the decency to do what would be the obvious thing if we were talking about a family overspending instead of an entire country…

Hi…

I have started to put together the library pages here at “BuggingIn” and I hope you enjoy my first one.  It is about gold and I will be continuing to update and improve this page over time…

Here’s the link to the new page—>  Survival Library: Gold & Survival

This website is NOT going to be all about precious metals- gold and silver- soon we are going to get to how to prepare to survive… Food, water and similar topics.  Hang on…

Please let me know what you think of this information.

Rob

It appears that Gold is about to cross the psychological barrier of $1000 an ounce in the very near future.

Silver is at $16.36 and climbing.

Investors are worried about many things that could weigh on the value of the US dollar and see precious metals as a good place to protect the value of some of their assets.