Renaissancemen.org

First – I ran through a whole lot of reasons you should be worried in 2022 about things. Check it out here.

I don’t mean to be doom and gloom, but knowing what I know, I wake up a lot in the middle of the night – my mind racing. What can I do to protect my family more? While my wife may say something like…”no one reads your stupid blogs” – I do have quite a following here and on Twitter now I built up.

What I’m doing here is not writing this to scare you, but perhaps help you protect your family more IF you have the same worries that I have. Reading this is sort of like doomsday insurance for your bank account. IF I’m wrong, you can sleep better know you prepared. IF I’m right, well – you’re going to be ahead of at least 95% of people out there. I’m going to cover a lot of topics in this blog. I have written other blogs as breakouts from this one – in that I cover things far more in depth in some of them if you want to go down a rabbit hole. I think there’s a book in this as well, but there’s a lot of “preppers” out there that may be ex Army Rangers, so I’m going to keep my stuff topical with a financial twist and leave it to them to tell you how to skin and eat a rattlesnake.

Background: The premise here is that it is very possible that the US dollar suffers a currency collapse inside of 5-10 years, perhaps in as little as 1-2 with the way things are going. Most casual readers look at the dollars in their wallet and equate that to money, with purchasing power. It is not money, it is currency with purchasing power with the full faith, credit, and backing of the US government. We are the world’s reserve currency, so it is even laughable for me to say this. Until it is not. Just last week, you had Jerome Powell talk about “there can be more than one world reserve currency” undoing about 5 years of policy.

What I have witness in my 2.5 years of a deep dive is..

• Banks don’t trust each others’ collateral (as evidenced by repo Sept 2016)
• Our commodities markets are pretty much rigged to favor big banks and price discovery has been lost
• Artificial numbers pumped out to public with intent to keep interest rates low so wealthy can constantly re-finance cheaper (CPI)
• Exit from the gold standard has led to runaway debt and derivatives
• People are aware of the price of everything, but the value of little (relative to gold)
• Very few people have any real understanding of the problems that we are seeing
• $30T in debt can most likely never be paid back without taking interest rates to 10-15% or inflating us out of debt and creating a super inflation which may 100% erode a middle class in a “hyperstagflationary” environment
• News is bought and paid for by corporate sponsorship and there’s a lack of trust in them
• Very few companies and people own just about everything, and it’s setting up for a Great Reset run by few elites who want you to eat bugs for protein in a globalist society or a system that is driven by commodity production and domestic production supply chains to on-shore jobs. My bet is high unemployment is coming, and no one wants UBI, they want a job.
• In my 6 years of graduate school, there was never one mention of “gold” anywhere. Our entire western education system has sort of gaslit all modern economists to not actually know what gold and silver are or were. This is stark contrast to eastern cultures who have used it for thousands of years as money and wealth. There’s a collision of societies about to happen.

Big picture is there are a few ways this can play out if you look on the YouTubes long enough. Where we are now with debt and unfunded liabilities can lead to a never ending doom-vortex death spiral of inflation up until it collapses down (hyper inflations apparently don’t last forever, but the value of the currency erodes) and then normalizes perhaps with a new currency OR we may run into a deflationary shock with higher interest rates that has everything sold off for a run to the dollar in a great deflation – sort of like the Great Depression and then a super-hyper inflation after that when the government throws the money bombers at it OR a “hypserstagflation” for 5 years or more like the 1970s which just has stagnant GDP growth but consistently high inflation.

What I’m about to write to you below covers all three of those scenarios, for the most part. So, sit back, relax, get a pot of coffee, print this thing out, and keep it in your desk. You might want to review now to get some things started. It’s possible we have a few years, and it’s possible somehow, we figure things out and all is well. In my country of the US, fairly few people here understand real hardships. I grew up where my dad never made more than $13,000 a year his whole life and my mom was a stay-at-home mom until I was 5 or 6. My mom eventually went back and finished college, became a CPA, then later in her career became a compliance officer for one of the big 5 based out of NYC. Until I was 10 or so, that put us around the poverty line, but we never really lived with excesses so I never really FELT poor until I went to college and saw what other people had. So I’m writing this through the lens of someone who has faced economic hardship in the wealthiest nation on earth – meaning I understand the comparisons to how I grew up were still better than 90% of the people on the planet. This is being written to those of you who may have SOME means of protection yourself right now.

Empty shelves – one problem you have right now is a political entity is trying to control the narrative. Ukraine makes 25% of the world’s wheat and they aren’t planting this year. Russia is about to withhold….everything. The world is about to find out how much we need them. Many countries now are stopping the export of food and goods. This globalist experiment that Klaus Schwab and the WEF crowd wants is about to be told to pound sand. But there’s a few ways empty shelves can happen with the dopes that run things. First, they want to blame “greedy farmers”. Yeah – when was the last time you pictured that? Fuel/diesel prices are through the roof. Natural gas is needed to make fertilizer. So less fertilizer due to cost means lower world crop yields. These dopes stopped us producing energy. What that means then is energy costs go up because supply went way down. There’s a lot more to this, but I can bet their next play is to try and add taxes (windfall) to drive up energy costs even MORE. Everything is shipped with energy. Homes are heated and cooled with it. So make no mistake, there’s about to be a lot of empty shelves – and when people understand this issue, they will be stocking all they can at home, ASAP. They will be taking these stupid little green slips of paper and trading it for the last food on the shelves.

Understanding NEED versus WANT

In order to succeed at any of the below, you must get into a mindset of looking through the lens of necessities. Do I buy a 50 pound bag of oats now that could feed my family for 3 months or do I take my family out to dinner now? Do I buy that fancy new whatever or pay down debt? At issue is I’m sort of revolted by the level of excess in my society here. I get it if you have disposable income – but what you are seeing from most of your friends and family is living excessively in debt. How to MANAGE debt properly and responsibly is another conversation, but for now, I want you to look at what you spend now, and stop spending on stupid shit. That ends today.

IF you understand the problem I’m talking about, you then have to focus your energy on the below items. These can keep you safe, healthy, and perhaps get you to the other side of something unscathed.

Read a lot

I’d advise you to start off with “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” and check out a 4 hour video series called “the Hidden Secrets of Money” on YouTube. This will start to get you to understand that the paper in your wallet is just paper, and that there may be other forms of buying things down the road. And – they can provide you an understanding on how money actually is supposed to work and how we sort of did our thing to screw that up starting in 1971. There’s also “The Fourth Turning” which is sort of a terrifying book based on generational theory. We are approaching the sweet spot to repeat the Great Depression and rise of Hitler. Remember the roaring 20s in your books? This is what it looks like if you look at the stock market today.

Get extra at the grocery store

Store what you eat, eat what you store. I found a website where you can buy a lot of dry goods in bulk at webstaurantstore.com. I am a low-carb and keto advocate. I have to admit, I LOVE eating like that. But I also have to admit it can get awfully damn expensive to source calories. On the plus side, with keto/low carb it was extremely easy for me to do One Meal A Day (OMAD) and 3 day fasts. I lost 175 pounds at one point and put the COVID 50 back on so with this inflation, I’m going back to a 40/30/30 I did before. That is, 40% of calories from carbs, 30% from fats, and 30% from protein. This allows me to source calories cheaper as well as store a lot more calories longer on the shelves.

Consider adding more to your cart on every trip. An extra box of pasta. A bag of rice. Extra toilet paper. It adds up over time. In an inflationary environment, costs will continue to rise, so more you buy today is saving money later.

Pro tips – buy big bags of rice, pastas, cans of sauces, canned meats, etc. Get a relationship with a local farmer to buy in bulk for meats like quarter cows and the like. Get a stand up freezer or chest freezer (if you can find them) before they run out.

Get your energy at today’s prices

I’m a precious metals mining investor and about a year ago started looking into solar. I’m like, “I don’t have $30k for solar”. Well, yeah. I didn’t. Why would I pay for solar? So I can spend $30,000 to $50,000 to replace a $150 electric bill? My finance professor during my MBA once said, “if someone offers you a free loan, take it”. When I looked up solar – I did a 6 part series on this and it was flipped on last week – I was able to finance through all of these guys. IF you choose to finance, they throw bones in with the price then tell you “2% for 20 years”. Inflation is 10%, at least. To me, this is a free loan. What I ended up getting after everything was solar and batteries. I had read that in Venezuela, their hyper inflation became so bad that they ended up allowing 1 hour of power per week per home. With solar, if the grid goes down, you cannot produce power unless you have a battery. So I got the battery. Everything costs me about $25 per month more than what I pay now, but I now have a guarantee of generating power and powering my freezers, fridge, and sump pump through any conditions. I just had a storm event this past weekend where I pull from the grid to save my batteries. In case power went out, I could then pull from my 100% battery. I woke up this morning and had used about 35% of my battery over a 12 hour night period. So I might get 24-36 hours of power from the battery – but remember, during the day I generate more. I designed a system that produces 116% of my needs, and sell extra back to the grid.

One other thing I was worried about when I started my research was credit freezing and the availability of silver – which is a key component in solar panels. Silver is in thousands of products as an industrial commodity, but it’s usually in trace amounts. For example, your iPhone has .4g of silver in it. A solar panel has 20g in it. Most homes might need 20-40 solar panels for a setup. Do the math. Big picture I did an analysis of the silver supply/demand out there and all of you people who want to turn off coal, natural gas, and oil are smoking crack if they think they can actually source anywhere near the silver they need for all of the solar they want to do. Estimates have about 19 years of silver left. At today’s supply of about 1 billion oz (800m oz mined, 200m oz scrap), the demand is even more. And that is with something like 3% of the world’s power generated by solar. Where are you getting 190 pounds of copper for every EV? Pipe dreams. But the problem is, when many of you start to see your electric bill doubling and you can then finally afford solar (this is their wet dream people) – you may be waiting years to get your solar panels. By the way, most of them are made in China so good luck with that with the supply chains.

Pro tip read my series on here about solar. I go over EVERYTHING from soup to nuts, and also go over the financials. This was well before energy exploded in price. Most of us saw some version of this coming.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Protect yourself

For years I’ve had security systems. You can also finance these things through Ring and pay like $8 per month for monitoring. Cameras everywhere, motion sensors, glass breaking sensors, the works. This helps you sleep more soundly at night. I live in a country where we exercise our 2nd Amendment rights, and with that, you can help defend yourself in a tough situation, and I’ll leave it at that. Both my wife and I are trained on close quarter combat and while you hope it never comes to that, any little bit helps.

Get healthy

I have 137 blog posts here on healthy living. Big picture is that in an environment where costs are rising far faster than wages, people may eat a lot worse and drive less. This can lead to people being sedentary and eating terribly. If you are in good shape, that’s less meds you have to buy that you can’t afford. You prevent a $50,000 bill from a heart attack. Healthy eating CAN be expensive, but there are ways to eat healthy for less.

Plant a garden

All 4 of my grandparents were children of a depression, and they both had fantastic gardens. Why not learn a skill to plant your own foods? Berries are easy as hell, and even I could do them. In a true life or death situation, you are growing calories in your yard. If you have little ones, you probably share food security concerns with me. Let me tell you something if you are poor. You are about to go get window food for $10 so you are happy for one meal. I bought a 50 pound bag of rolled oats for $56 shipped to me. That’s 250 bowls of oats (healthy as shit) for the price of 5 of your window food meals. Plant some raspberries and you got a nice lunch for a year with oatmeal and berries for $50. There’s 10g of fiber and 10g of protein with 1 cup, so it can give you a feeling of fullness. I used to all top with chia seeds for another 10g of fiber using overnight oats and milk. Each serving had about 30g of protein.

Store cash

I am a hard money advocate of gold and silver. But when a crisis DOES happen, the first thing that happens is NOT to break out the silverware, but use cash on hand. I wrote about this a little in how to prepare for a cyber attack – but in this situation, the currency is probably melting down in value by the day. That is, it takes more and more currency units to buy things. You say, “the price is going up!!”. What you are not understanding is that is the value of your currency going down against that. Try to have about $500 cash per person in the house – IF possible. The first few days, if you are caught offsides, you might be able to buy some food to last you awhile, WHILE people are taking your cash.

Buy staples and vices

I don’t smoke, and I rarely drink – but it’s nice to have a decent amount of alcohol here. Big bags of sugar, salt, spices – these things can come in handy to trade. I also have a med kit I bought – if anyone has seen “1883”, it’s a masterpiece of what life was like on the Oregon trail. But you become quickly aware of the dangers of not having the ability to get medical attention. Things to treat infections may go a LONG way. IF a currency collapses and you have a child, and he is sick – you go to the store to buy medicine and the shelves are empty. These are things you need to have extra of, and now.

Rentals

IF you have the ability to rent something out, go for it. I didn’t need a 5BR home. But that’s all I’ve lived in since 2002 or so, with one small exception. I have always wanted to live in much bigger houses and then rent out as needed. In my current situation I don’t need to rent out – but if we do a replay of the 1930s, I can probably house 2 families here. And, while they may be going through difficult times with us, potentially more people contributing can help pay the bills.

Also – I refinanced what I could. I own rentals as part of my portfolio. I had heard in the 1930s, people were bulldozing rental properties because they could not afford the assessed taxes. If I have supremely low fixed cost mortgage payments and a rental rate that could melt up, that helps me potentially buy more things to survive a currency crisis. If someone doesn’t want to pay that rent, there are 10 people behind them on a wait list. It’s unfortunate, but until the housing sector has a complete collapse, this could be the norm for a bit. Personally, I feel an interest rate hike to slow inflation is needed, but think about how that shocks the credit markets. Businesses can no longer expand because they cannot afford the cost of capital. People can’t afford these pricey homes. Commercial and residential real estate prices collapse as unemployment goes through the roof. We aren’t there yet because they kicked the can down the road when they printed $6 trillion. It’s coming.

So IF you get in a crisis – think about other people who can rent from you or people who you can rent from. During the depression – and coming out of it – you’d have elderly living with their children. You see this now where my wife is from in reverse – adults are forced to live with their parents until they die. No one can afford housing on Long Island, NY. There’s sooooooo many open acres here that it is BEGGING people to relocate to where the real estate is far cheaper. I believe in this country there may be a lot of UHauls used for those fleeing high cost of living areas for more rural areas.

Land

I tried to look at buying land by me, but my wife now thinks I’m certifiable. I can’t talk to her about this stuff, as it is depressing for her. But, this is real life, so someone has to strap up and get it done. Around me you can find remote lots for 5, 10, 20 acres for $50,000-$100,000. If you mortgage that, you are looking at $200-$300 per month or so. If you have income generating properties like rentals above, you can use those proceeds to then pay for the land. Why have it? The land I was looking at had deer, bears, foxes, turkeys – it could be a good place to hunt or get away from things if areas need urban areas get too hot. I was also trying to find something near a water source for fishing and camping.

Buying an RV

My brother had a pop up and then an RV for years he’d visit. He did it at a campground about an hour from his house. He had a 2BR townhouse, so this was sort of like a summer home for him in a poconos campground. With what he was paying for it, it was like the monthly cost was one night in a hotel nowadays. I can’t even think about going to a hotel on a beach in NJ around here. $400-$500 a night for a hotel? Go fuck yourself. I grew up where our family had a tent and camping gear, and we’d pack up a cooler, the tent, go to the campground for $7 a night. There was a public pool there and a lake we used to fish at – my dad bought the row boat for $200 lol.

With this land and RV, you could get away anytime you want, and anywhere you want. The land could be a place where you plant a ton of berries and go visit from time to time. Maybe riots erupt in the city you live near and the suburbs start getting looted. You need to get the hell out. Maybe you have a 30 min notice. Your RV may be stored somewhere with a ton of dry goods and emergency supplies in it.

Maybe you avoid bad times and use the RV to go to campgrounds for vacations. The cost to vacation for a week at campground + the monthly RV payment is still less than one night in a hotel in NJ by the beach.

Buying a pickup truck

I traded in my 2019 highlander for a 2018 Ram 1500. While I don’t think I can tow a large camper with it, I can tow A camper with it. But more importantly, I have a TON of space in the back if we have to get out of dodge quickly. I had a ton of problems getting mulch and building supplies in my highlander. I now am a pickup truck owner for life. In a currency collapse situation, I don’t like the gas prices with this, but what I DO like is that I may be able to work with my hands doing things and use that as a tool.

Learn skills

I’m not talking about Bear Grylls fire starting. I bought a massive pack of lighters for that and quick starter kits. But when all of this started going sideways in 2019, I realized if I lost my field of expertise that I could be rather useless if the power went off. But in that vein, with a situation like a currency collapse, there may be work to be done with your hands. Day labor. Working for food. I have done a good amount with finishing my basement over 10 months that I now feel at least semi-handy around the house.

Gold and silver

Most of my blogs the past 2 years dealt with this, so no need to bash you over the head with paragraphs on this. I’d say that these are rather useless the first few months of a currency crisis. You can go to any gold/silver shop in the country and get cash for it. However, I heard a story on one of my YouTube channels. I forget who it was, I’m sorry – but it was their parents or grandparents ran a coin and jewelry shop. The old man was out and while he was out, shit went crazy with the currency and people were lined up around the corner to buy metals. The old man came back and closed the shop because it was silly to give away the precious metals for worthless currency.

So you might see a point a few weeks/months in where anyone that has anything of substance will never trade you paper currency for it. Next might be things like jewelry, watches, rings – these things will hold value, but when you buy them, you pay a MASSIVE premium for the jewelry aspect of it. A silver necklace from Tiffany’s is like $300. It might be $15 of silver. Waste of money. If you want to get pure gold jewelry you can get things from Mene. To me, I look at all of the food, staples, jewelry – all of that is money. But the BEST money lasts the LONGEST. This is why gold is the king of money.

I figure for 95% of the people reading this, look to get a shoe box of valuables. That’s all you need. Perhaps look to buy junk silver, old jewelry. Maybe 20 oz of silver per person per house might be fine. If you can stack more, so be it. If you get more silver than the shoe box, then consider buying some gold to put in that shoe box. Gold is extremely dense and is valued currently at 80:1 of silver, but historically over 4900 years it was 15:1. So many like the idea of getting silver with the idea that someday silver may go back to 10-15:1 and they take their silver and get 5-6 times more gold than if they were to just buy gold outright now. Silver premiums are no joke right now. Ask me about silver if you have any questions, or you can check out “how to layer your gold and silver investments” here.

Think about the first few weeks of a currency crisis. What are you using to acquire things?

• Cash
• Marketable skills
• Food produced by you (farm/fishing/hunting)
• Unused tradeable objects – old gym equipment?
• Bulk excess items (if you have 10 guns, you could sell 9. 50 pounds of oats, you sell 25 pounds)
• Luxury tradeable items (jewelry, watches)
• Non-life saving medical supplies
• Perishable food
• Booze, coffee, smokes, and other vices
• Frozen food
• Canned food
• Gold/silver
• Bullets/guns
• Life saving medical needs

Now, many others who don’t know anything what we know might put gold and silver near the top. The thing is, during all currency crisis in history (or at least prior to 1971), when currencies died, they would always come back pegged to something like gold. We had a bimetallic standard for the first 100 years or so, then had silver in the coinage until the 60s. Gold and silver have been money for 5,000 years. And – they keep well over time. They are recognized as money. So on the other side of a currency crisis, if you are sitting on a pile of gold, you literally have a fortune in whatever new currency is pegged to it. Consider this – if in 1920 you put $10,000 and the 500 gold ounces you could buy then at $20 each and put them in a safe – then came back 100 years later and time traveled, your $10,000 cash would still be sitting there and the 500 gold coins would now be worth $1,000,000 in today’s cash. Meaning, the gold coins did not GAIN VALUE. The $10,000 LOST SPENDING POWER in 100 years. In a currency crisis, that 100 year loss of purchasing power could happen in 2-4 years. Still like the idea of sitting on $100,000 in your bank account? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

My best friend had pointed out how important guns are in the money equation. Think about all of that money above. IF you KNEW times were tough that were coming, would you not trade a lot of the items above with the ones below it? Like you would exchange cash for everything below it. But when I was putting bullets and guns on this list, I realized that the ONLY thing I’d trade my bullets and guns for would be life-saving medicine – I am not a diabetic, but you can imagine someone who was desperate would give up anything for insulin to live.

What happens in a currency crisis is what we are seeing now. What you are seeing is the world getting off of dollars. Including rich people. They are putting massive amounts of cash into boats, businesses (stocks), real estate, art – and all of this stuff is melting up in price. This is supply and demand – where these people are fighting hand over fist to get something tangible for that cash. A business that produces cash is a good investment in and inflation – and you see it with P/E ratio of Tesla at 390x, for example. IF we saw gold and silver melt up like in the 1970s (gold went up 24x, silver 29x), it would be a full out crisis. Look at how close that is at the bottom. What are we seeing now??

• low unemployment – marketable skills are being used
• Food prices going up faster than they want to tell us. Store shelves getting bought out. Shortages to come
• Real estate melting up. Stock market melting up
• Commodity prices exploding (think coffee and other staples)
• Can’t find ammo anywhere for many types of guns. If so, the price is jacked WAY high.
• Stupid high premiums on metals

The point was though, that guns help you keep all of your stuff, and in REALLY BAD times, help you get stuff.

Got guns?

I could go on and on, but this is something I wanted to share with a lot of my non-metals crowd who don’t get a lot of this.