I genuinely feel that there will be another economic collapse in the next 5 years and I want to protect my assets as much as possible.
Will I be better off having a personal reserve of gold/silver help during an economic crisis?
Are there better ways to address this?
view the rest of the comments →
Largemarge ago
Buying gold is rarely a way to make a significant amount of money. The whole point of gold is its stability. When the market is up, stability is less important, and the value of gold drops somewhat; and when the market is down, investors seek to hold value and gold is one way to do that, so gold rises. But these shifts are relatively small compared to the market, and the smallness of those changes is what gold is all about. Over time, the value of gold generally keeps pace with inflation. Holding gold will never be a way to get rich.
However, anyone who's watched daytime television has seen advertisements hawking gold as the next big wave in investment, predicting massive increases in value. Just who is running these commercials; and if gold is such a great investment, why aren't they buying it themselves instead of buying TV ads to sell gold to you? That should tip you off. The companies running these advertisements are financial services companies. They are in the business of lending money, generally at high interest rates. They frankly don't care what you do with the loan, whether you buy gold with it or a jet ski; what they're after is the interest on your loan. Trust me, they make far more money off your interest than they would if they bought gold instead.
Some companies take it a step farther and stamp the gold into non-negotiable coins, often giving some impressive-sounding name for the coin to give the impression it's a valuable piece of currency, prized by collectors. Be skeptical. The vast majority of these are simply a way for them to sell you the gold at a price higher than its actual value as gold; but to anyone you might sell it to, it's only worth the gold it's made from, so you'll lose money. There are some exceptions. South African Krugerrands and American Eagle coins, for example, are minted by governments as a way to facilitate private ownership of gold and do have a value slightly higher than the bullion itself, but their price fluctuates in line with other gold; so they're really of no greater value than just a plain gold bar, just easier to buy and sell.
---http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4214