I wish I had a nickel for every nickel I once had …
Sometimes, my ideas aren’t that stupid ….
I just read a story that told me it costs 3.69 cents to make a penny and nearly 14 cents to produce a nickel.
Apparently, President Trump - to save money for the government - is going to try to quit making the penny.
(A good trivia question would be when was the last year you could buy a product for a penny? My kids won’t believe this, but when I was growing up a piece of bubble gum cost one penny, the same price as a piece of peppermint candy.)
This story reminded me, when it comes to my “great investment ideas,” I’ve often been proven right, but have never benefited from my sage wisdom.
For example, about a dozen years ago, I read a story about a millionaire who was saving nickels because he knew in the future the metal value used to make a nickel would be much greater than 5 cents.
His logic made sense (or cents) to me and I started doing the same thing.
Every time I went to the bank, I would swap a few bucks for a few rolls of nickels.
I eventually filled up, and hid in the garage, several plastic tackle boxes with rolls of nickels.
If I remember correctly, my nickel horde had grown to about $1,200, which I kept telling my wife would be worth at least $5000 by the time we had to pay for our first child’s college education and/or her orthodontics bill (which is coming up in a few months!)
Destiny plays a hand …
Alas, one day I got a notice from our home mortgage company that the company had recalculated our note payment and, due to insufficient money being taken out for insurance, our bill was going to go up the next year by approximately … $1,200.
My options were having a note payment that went up about $100/month or I could bite the bullet and send the company a check for the amount of the deficit.
I didn’t like either option, but I then remembered my nickel stash and, as usual, made the wrong financial decision and carried a wheel barrow of nickels down to the bank to get some free money to cover the unexpected spike in my mortgage payment.
That ended my great Nickel-Saving Project.
In retrospect, if I hadn’t gotten this bill (or had staged an emergency yard sale to cover the expense), I would have kept saving or adding nickels at the same pace and would probably have at least $5,000 in nickels today.
The melt value of those nickels would be almost $15,000!
Now I don’t know who would give me “melt value” for my nickels, but someone either already will … or will do this in the future - as (trust me here) the cost of nickel is NOT going to go down.
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I was once a “silver bug” …
I also did the same thing with pre-1965 silver coins.
Once upon a time, I wasn’t a gold bug; I was a silver bug. (Silver is “the poor man’s gold.”)
When my parents both passed away in 2010, I inherited some silver coins that had been passed down to my parents from their own fathers (Bob Rice and Hickey Chapman).
This inheritance made me check the price of silver at the time, which I was stunned to learn was about $42/ounce!
Not only did I decide to keep those coins, I started acquiring all the ounces of silver I could afford.
(The price of silver collapsed after hitting almost $50, which actually meant I could add to my collection at prices around $18 to $25/ounce).
By 2012, I was a big Ron Paul supporter and, as Paul supporters all know, Ron Paul is also a big “gold and silver bug.”
The idea behind saving silver is simple.
Basically, people do this because they think “real inflation” is going to sky-rocket and it’s good to have an “insurance policy” or “real money” that will hold its value or maybe even appreciate in value.
What I didn’t know when I went all-in on being a “silver bug” is that the “markets” for silver are (my opinion) rigged to high heavens.
The reason these markets are “manipulated” is so the Man on the Street never figures out how bad real inflation really is. The Powers that Be don’t want tens of millions of people getting rid of their “Monopoly” fiat money and acquiring “history’s money” (gold and silver).
That’s why, in a devious psy-op, someone coined the term “gold bug” and “silver bug” - to make people like myself seem like crazy kooks (just like they tried to make Ron Paul sound).
(Aside: Among Tea Party libertarians like myself, “Ron Paul was right” is one of our favorite mantras. We also like our own pejorative, Republicans in Name Only - “RINOS.”)
Due to details too painful to recount, I no longer have all the silver I collected.
Still, I’m somewhat of an expert on silver.
Don’t listen to the president …
For example, I know the back story of why president Lyndon Johnson signed the law that ended the use of silver in dimes, quarters and half dollars. (The government had already stopped using silver in “silver dollars.”)
When he did this in 1964, President Johnson told Americans not to hoard their pre-1965 silver coins, assuring Americans their value would NOT go up.
All smart Americans ignored the President and knew that the government was getting ready to ramp up its printing press to pay for both the Vietnam War and LBJ’s “Great Society” programs. Inflation was inevitable.
***
When Johnson got rid of silver coins, a gallon of gas cost about 25 cents.
Today, anyone can quickly sell a 1964 quarter and pocket about $5.75 (the current melt value of a pre-1965 quarter, according to this handy-dandy website.)
Since gas is $2.75/gallon today in Troy, Alabama, a person can buy twice the amount of gas he could buy with the exact same quarter in 1964.
However, if you use a 1965 non-silver quarter, this will buy you about a Dixie Cup’s worth of gas and get you about 500 yards of driving.
As bugs go, the silver wackos might have been onto something all along.
And, man, I wish I had my nickels back.
*** (You don’t need a penny to get a subscription to The Troy Citizen. You can get one for free!) ***
You do have lots of good ideas and your heart was in the right place. Your head, too! Another good idea you had was when you married me.
True story! In the 1920s, my parents considered buying a candy store in Chicago Illinois. They went to inspect the property and were amazed at the number of children that were coming to buy candy for a penny a piece.. then somehow they discovered that the owner had a friend passing out pennies to the kids in the neighborhood to pump up the value of the candy store! I wish I had remembered the story to put in my autobiography!