Precious Metal Storage

I don't have the bulk of my investments in metals, but I do have a pretty good sum. I consider this an insurance policy more than anything, for a worst case scenario. And it wouldn't take a full upheaval to make it very useful indeed. Imagine if you lived in Poland in 1938 or Germany in 1946 and had a few gold coins to use bribing your way out of the country.

Most of it was acquired six or seven years ago, so I was lucky in terms of the price I paid. However, I started to get pretty nervous about it as the price went up. It seems that it made me a pretty big target for a robbery--not that anyone around here would know I have it. But people still have ways of figuring these things out. So I moved it to a safe deposit box at the local bank, where it has been for several years.

But doesn't that kind of defeat the point? If you need your emergency gold and silver the proverbial brown stuff has already hit the rotating assembly of blades and is flinging in all directions. Banks might fail or have their assets confiscated by the government, and if that happens, the first thing they'll do is plunder the safe deposit boxes. Of course they would confiscate my belongings, and if I were lucky, I might get paid in rapidly depreciating pieces of paper.

So if storing at home is too dangerous and storing at the bank is pointless, what's left? Watch the news carefully and run to the bank when things look iffy?