I was feeling a little nervous the other day when I thought about my bank account.
You see, I have just $1,600 in there at the moment.
For some reason, that got me a bit worried. I think in this country, we often equate our worth with our bank accounts.
I quickly reversed this worried thinking by doing a quick tally of my assets. Personally, I don’t have much faith in the US Dollar or the banks propping it up. I also know that banks view my money as a liability, not an asset.
It’s only an asset when it’s in my hands. For that reason, I have a $1,000 emergency fund of cash, and I also have a couple thousand more dollars on hand. I’d hate for the banks to close for any amount of time and for me to be left high and dry, no cash on hand. So I make it a point that something like that will never happen.
How many other Americans can say the same? Hell, we know most can’t come up with $400 in case of an emergency.
Before the idiotic lockdowns of last year, I had around $3,000 in the stock market. I got spooked last summer and sold it all, with many stocks earning me a loss. Things like Carnival and Canopy Growth and my oil and solar and wind stocks. All have since rebounded.
I put that money into gold and silver and I have a drawer at home that’s worth more than many of the cars driving by out my window right now.
We know the precious metals market is complete hogwash. As a percentage, inflation has increased more over the past year than the price of gold has.
The Fed is keeping its foot on the heart of the economy. They have to keep interest rates at near-zero. If they don’t, it’ll all come crashing down.
What position will you be in when that happens?
What will your assets be worth, and will you have access to them? Just think about it - if it begins to crash, the banks will close or at the very least, limit withdrawals.
How much food do you have?
And let’s say it did all come down...and silver went from around $25 to $100 or more. How would you turn that silver into dollars, would you want to, and what would you do with the dollars?
The dollar is pretty much worthless as it is now. Savings accounts are worthless. There’s just the Wall Street casino...or is there?
I told you earlier that Bitcoin had gone from $30,000 at the start of the year to over $60,000 last week before falling back to around $50,000.
I own 0.0178 of Bitcoin, which is worth about $900 at the moment. Besides that I have:
- 0.17 shares of Ethereum
- 3.4 shares of Chainlink
- 25 shares of EOS
- 145 shares of Zillqa
- 200 shares of Tron
- 209 shares of Ox
- 300 shares of Dogecoin
- 14,000 shares of Electroneum
Why would I have so many shares of that? What do I know that you don’t?
I have more money in crypto than I have in the bank at the moment. And that’s not by accident. I worked for my money, and I want it to work for me. The bank cannot make that happen, at the dictates of the Fed.
In addition to that, I got back into the stock market when the GME shorts were happening a couple months ago, mainly as a way of ‘sticking it to the man.’
So I bought a lot of the ‘retail stocks’ like AMC and Blackberry. Since then I’ve been buying up what I call ‘inflationary stocks,’ or industries that are seeing shortages of materials.
So this week I bought up Louisiana Pacific Corp. and Jeld-Wen Holdings, two companies that produce building materials. The former makes OSB, or oriented strand board, one of the key components in homebuilding, and something that’s in extremely short supply. You could buy it for $5 last you but now it’s $10 and it’ll likely go higher.
Yeah, I might not be able to buy a house of my own...but I can invest in the home-buying craze.
The biggest question I have is, when to pull it all out before it all comes crashing down? So many throughout history have been a lot smarter than me when it comes to that. I mean, I pulled out last summer, and at a loss.
And what will the new capital gains tax ideas of moving the tax from 24% to 43% do to the markets? When will that take effect, in 2022 or retroactively to some time earlier, so investors can’t realize their gains? Or will Congress compromise on some kind of smaller increase, say to 28%? We know that people like Pelosi stand to lose a great deal if such an increase were to take place. Many in Montana would be hit as well. Hell, over 40% of Missoula citizen earnings are from such.
Lots of questions, and that leads to uncertainty, which markets don’t like.
I’m glad I have my eggs in lots of different baskets.
But will it be enough, when the time comes? And in a cyclical economy, it always does.
