Silver Stacking help

I agree junk silver is a good medium to buy silver. I have also been preaching that many premiums disappear is pm spikes. I also agree that pm should be a long term investment for most. The buy/sell premiums are too severe for most people to come out ahead on trades, and small investors are pretty bad at buying high/selling low.

Regarding your brokerage, I do not feel that inquiry is unfair. They are not designed to be a bank, and you never bought securities. So they have to worry about if you were using the brokerage account to launder funds. Regarding post #20, ALL OF US should always be looking to swap out cash for real assets. Cash is a medium of exchange, not a store of value. It does not matter if we are talking quarters, FRN's, US notes, etc all modern cash is not meant to be a store of long term value. Investments like land, stocks, bonds, and yes PM are used for that purpose. So, I wouldn't blame it on the rich, any rational person should change out cash for long term assets.

 

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Why do people so frequently make the assumption that it's either precious metals or guns, and not both?

 

As for the OP, 90% silver is a safe bet. Not that the price of silver can't drop from here, but rather that they are easily identifiable, hardly ever counterfeited, come in convenient denominations, have a relatively low buy-sell spread at most dealers, and they can easily be bought and sold between private parties to eliminate those dealer premiums.

I would personally avoid war nickels and 40% silver halves. The silver content is just too low and they typically sell at a discount. Sure, that means you can also buy at a discount, but not if you're going through a dealer. Another reason to avoid them is storage. $1000 worth of war nickels and 40% halves will take up more space and weigh more than $1000 worth of 90% silver.

I also like Eagles and other government issued bullion like Maples, Libertads, etc, but I typically only buy them when I can get them for less than 10% over spot.

I have a few 5 and 10 ounce bars, but just for the heck of it. I wouldn't recommend buying them for stacking because they are more difficult for the buyer to confirm authenticity and PM content. Skeptical buyers will not offer as much money as confident buyers when it comes time for you (or your heirs) to sell.

Many people like the 5 oz ATB rounds from the US Mint. You can occasionally pick those up for around 10% over spot too.

If you're new to stacking, one thing to keep in mind is security. Do not buy a "safe" from Wal-Mart, or Office Max, or Staples, or Costco, or a sporting goods store. If you're going to stack any substantial amount of precious metals, you should look into renting a safe deposit box, or purchasing a real safe from a reputable safe dealer. A good safe will have a UL rating of at least TL15. (Wikipedia has a good explanation of safe ratings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe )

The best way to ensure you're getting all the security you paid for in a safe is to have it properly installed. Virtually any safe can be easily moved to a vehicle if it isn't secured in place, thus providing a burglar extra time and privacy to work on opening your safe. Not being secured also enables a burglar to lay your safe down on the floor giving them the advantage of gravity when using a pry bar to open the door.

The next best step to take is to connect your safe to your home security system. Good physical security is fine and dandy, but combining it with electronic security is essentially a security multiplier.

Welcome to the hobby and good luck!

 

Well I was kind of making a joke of the whole situation. If it gets so bad that the dollar collapses, I wont need my own silver. I'll just come and take yours (hence the guns/ammo).

But this is starting to go off the rails a bit. OP was about type of silver to stack - IMO, I would stick with either 90% junk silver or silver coins from reputable mints like American Silver Eagles, Canadian Maple Leafs, etc. As the other poster stated, if you have bars/rounds from unknown mints it may be hard to convince the buyer that they are not fake/counterfeit when you need to sell them.

BTW, I agree w/ Blaubart on the safe issue - my safe is American Security (I think the model is AMSEC 4020) and this thing is built like... well, a safe. Very high quality in my opinion. Nothing fancy, but built for reliability.

 

Nice post Blaubart. OP, you can search other threads on safes wehre I outlined why installation is critical, and you are better off with a cheap safe installed properly rather than an expensve not improperly installed if you wish. The benefit of physical pm is you eliminate counterparty risk, but the downside is risk of physical theft.

 

Just for comparison, $1000 face value in junk silver pretty well fills a 5 x 10 inch safe deposit box, and weighs 65 to 70 pounds, so it's difficult to handle, especially 5 or 6 feet off the floor. I keep silver loose (not in tubes) in one quart Hefty Ziploc freezer bags (stronger plastic). I started in tubes, but that quickly became expensive, and when you sell, the first thing the dealer does is laboriously dump them out of the tubes into the hopper of a coin counter, so why bother? I also find that credit unions charge 1/2 to 3/4 as much as banks.

 

Yeah, the weight is the killer in storing coins in general. I have the larger size, (maybe 14"x14"x3'), and a lot of the space is boxes of collectible coins. Still, I have to lift it myself and its getting brutal. I am lucky its about 4 feet up, (good height for someone over 6 foot), and nearby is a cabinet I can place it on at similar height.

Coins are like books. A single coin or piece of paper seems light and innocuous enough, but place enough of them together and you quickly add up to some serious weight.

 

If you want to buy alot of silver but your worried about space, buy a Monster Box of AGE's.

It's small and compact and holds 500 ounces, but you need strong hands to handle it. You could easily stack a dozen boxes in a compact car's trunck there so small.

 

I think the monster boxes weigh in at about 37 pounds or so. Not so bad.

 

I want to add to the suggestions regarding government bullion - check your local coin stores (LCS) for "impaired" or "circulated" bullion pieces. My former LCS would buy silver eagles or maple leafs, etc. and ones that had spots or scuffs or anything that would knock it down from a mint state grade would be resold in the silver round bin for only a $1.50 or so above spot.

 

90% silver coinage is probably you best option if you are stacking as protection against a catastrophic financial event. They are silver and should provide reasonable protection from an inflationary event. They are also coinage and therefore money which would also provide some protection from a deflationary event. I am not sure what is going to happen in a catastrophic financial collapse. Due to fractional reserve banking - I am leaning towards it creating an event of hyperdeflation. As the banks start failing the money supply will constrict exponentially. It could turn out that the junk Morgan Silver Dollar will have greater purchasing power due to the fact it is a dollar as opposed to being silver.

 

Ummm.... what?

 

He's saying the metal could be worthless but the dollar would still be worth something.

 

That's exactly backwards.

 

The worst economical times of our nation have been in periods of deflation, so why does that seem implausible?

 

You've been listening to fairy tales from the propagandists.

 

First of all I didn't say silver would be worthless. I said it could turnout in a catastrophic economic event that a junk morgan dollar could have more purchasing power due to the fact it is a dollar compared to the purchasing power of the silver it contains. People losing faith in the banking system and your dollars they hold doesn't mean people will also lose faith in the dollars you hold in your wallet. Junk silver coinage is both wallet money and silver.

 

A silver dollar contains 0.773 Troy ounce of silver. If its valuation is less than a dollar, i.e., a dollar exceeds the value of the silver in a silver dollar, that means silver is available for $1.29 per ounce. That's why silver was selling for $1.29 through the 1930s and 1940s. If silver is currently roughly $19 per ounce, that means silver (metal) has declined in value by 93%. All silver thus tendered in the marketplace would disappear immediately, hoarded by households or businesses, highly preferable to paper dollars which could be printed at will (and currently ARE). Think of it as, inflation destroys households; deflation destroys commerce.

But all this has nothing to do with the concept of deflation. Without getting into long discussions, the Great Depression caused deflation, not vice versa. Several events are generally accepted as causing the Depression:
1. The stock market crash of 1929.
2. The failure of over 9,000 banks (there was no deposit insurance then).
3. Diminished incomes which resulted in a great contraction in consumer spending.
4. The great drought of 1930, which prevented farmers from raising enough crops to pay the taxes on their farms, causing many to be repossessed by banks, who were utterly unable to sell farmland under the circumstances, thus causing additional bank failures.

Fortunately for the Treasury Department, with its back against the wall by the late 1930s, World War II came along, with massive gains in employment, primarily government jobs and transportation jobs. At this time, women entered the workforce in large numbers, since millions of young men were serving (or would serve) in the military, reducing the number of available workers substantially.

In the next 5 years, deflation is possible, but hyperinflation is much more likely. The tipping point comes when foreign countries demand ever-higher interest rates (on Treasury bonds) to compensate for the risk of a dollar collapse. The Euro will disappear altogether, as its usage across Europe compels the rich nations to indirectly support the weak nations, the PIIGS, for instance. That's the weakest of the weak: Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain. Germany would drop the Euro and revert to the Deutsche Mark tomorrow if this action would not crush their primary export markets.

During hyperinflation, gold and silver will be the ONLY real money, and the unprepared middle class will be whacked for the second time in a decade. Will coin values (not bullion) surge or drop? I don't know, there's persuasive arguments both ways.

 

If the banking system fails 90% of the money supply disappears and velocity slows to a snails pace.

 

What exactly are you disagreeing with? Make your point, instead of just throwing out non-sense.