RANSVESTIA

8. Put a fair share of your assets into American silver coins - dimes quarters and halves dated 1964 and earlier. These are 90% pure silver. Their value lies in their silver content rather than their face value. Last April or May- I forget the exact date - they achieved a high market value of 4-1/2 times their face: that is, $1000 face value bags of coins sold for $4,500. I bought my first bag in November of 1971, less than 3 years ago, and I paid only $1158 for it. How is that for staying ahead of inflation? - nearly 100% per year for 3 years. But the game isn't over- you can still get into it at this point. As I write this, the price is around $3400-$3500 but it will go back up. The special thing about coins over silver ingots is that you could always spend a silver quarter or half dollar in the nearest Safeway under the worst of conditions. They might not give you all it was worth, but they would gladly take it. If paper money decays as it has in other inflations, you may need a whole shopping bag full of it to buy even simple foods.

9. Why silver? Because (a) it is rare, one of the precious metals, (b) it is an industrial material as well as a coinage metal. The photographic industry is based on it, the electronics industry uses large quantities, silver plating and jewelry account for a lot more. (c) It is not and has not been produced in quantities equal to its rate of use for some years, so that it has the factor of shortage to keep up its value. (d) There are very few pri- mary silver mines in the world where the mine is operated for its silver yield. Almost all silver is a by-product of the mining of copper, lead and zinc. When these are a glut on the market there is no incentive to work the mines at all, so silver production decreases.

10. You can buy silver as bullion in bars on both a “right now” basis and as futures-contracts for future deliveries; but this requires a lot of know- how and capital to risk the ups and downs of the commodities market, and most of you don't have either one.

11. How to buy silver. You can buy in small quantities for cash at a great number of coin shops, but check around for prices till you find a good supplier. You can buy "bags" of coins, $1000 to a bag outright, for cash, too. Or you can buy on "margin," which means that you put down about 35% of the going market value and borrow the balance from the broker. But at present interest rates you have to pay 11 to 12%. The value of the silver will undoubtedly rise considerably more than that in a year's time, but in the meantime you have to have the cash flow to take care of the quarterly interest payments. There are a number of brokers in this field in most of the larger cities. My company is the Pacific Coast Coin