In order to be properly prepped, whats the recommended cash to have on hand?   I use debit cards for everything, I never have cash.  I know thats not wise if electricity goes down.

$10,000.

Hicap:

You could have millions "in the bank" and still be screwed.  When a  major SHTF events happens, your electronic money is tied up.  No internet access (so no internet banking), no power or info to run ATM"s, banks are closed, small retailers do not have phone service so debit does not work, etc.  All the digital money in the world is of no use to you.  

I advise friends and family to have a significant amount of cash on hand, at home, in various denominations (it can be hard to 'make change').  I consider $1000 as a minimum.  Tis is cash that can  be used to buy ice, buy ohter necessities, pay for gas, cover travel expenses as you flee the hurricane, etc.  If you are a person of some means, then $5,000 or more is not unreasonable.  It can be grabbed with yu other stuff, and used to cover expenses while you are on the road, etc.

This is an excellent response.  The only thing I disagree on is the $ amounts are low.  I would consider $5000 as a minimum.

let me tell you 2 stories to illustrate my point.

Last year it seems my wife's debit card took a vacation to Germany. We found this out one saturday morning when she was checking our online banking and started to see charges popping up. We called the bank, they froze the account, disabled her debit card # and told us to get some kind of credit alerts asap. We did lifelock for a year. We got all kinds of alerts but nothing ever came of it. We couldnt use our own account for about 8-days.

Last month my wife's best friend had her debit card take a vacation to France. Same deal except for 1 major difference...

We usually keep $$$ in cash in the house. We lived out of that fund during the bank freeze time. Inconvenient? Sure. Personal shtf? Not so much.

I was telling some friends at work the other day and it had never occurred to them to ever just have cash that wasnt in the bank and I told them the above story. We recently had to deposit a good deal of cash into the bank as our down payment on our BOL. The lending company had to show that the cash existed so I went and deposited it for 3-days. Then I got it out and brought it back here. I have to admit, I was not really comfortable with it in the bank. Now thats not to say that I have all of my money here. That would be just as dumb as having it all in the bank.

I hope this helps.

1mth+ of living expenses

cash on hand...not bank, box, or online.

With interest rates what they are, there really isn't any financial opportunity cost for taking some of your emergency funds and putting them in your gun safe.

remember when a hurricane comes. gas stations do not take cash when the power is down

I would say a min is one month of all expenses.

Just a couple more notes here, pretty important.

1. According to da laws of the land, what you think of as a "deposit" or "account" in your bank, is not what you think it is, it is actually a LOAN from you to the bank on THEIR terms , which usually means that they are NOT required to pay it back upon immediate demand if they feel the situation is justified for them to keep it.

2. There is no bank that actually has all the cash deposited in their bank on hand, not even close, the bank is considered "adequately capitalized" if it has just 8% of total deposits on hand in cash, "well capitalized" if it has 10%, most banks hover at the 9% range, the FDIC will not even begin to take action until a bank falls below 6%.

Bottom line, if the SHTF, you are not gonna get a dime out of them, what money they have if they give any, will go to the wealthiest depositors. You are nuts if you keep a large balance in a bank these days. And your 401k and IRA's etc. are not safe anymore either, the idea has been floated around even as high as Tim Geithner (who is a world class piece of shit), that if things get too rough in this country, or if any of the credit rating companies like Moody's (more criminal shitbags) were to drop the U.S. credit rating thus accelerating some interest payments on the so-called "national debt", that a solution for them would be to seize the 2-3 trillion that Americans have in these accounts, and leave you essentially an IOU, bonds or whatever bullshit paper they feel like foisting on you.

This is not hysteria, this is real, it's not even that smart to pull your cash and sit on that, it's just a paper promissory note, it's not real property. But at a minimum get your money out of the hands of the banks and investment companies, it's not safe.

$2500 for me

I like to keep 3-4months of living expenses....

complete and utter BS.

ar-jedi

I keep a couple of grand worth of small bills in the house, as well as a few rolls of quarters and a couple of calling cards.

Most of our recurring monthly household bills are paid with a credit card for the sake of convenience, and we zero that balance out every month.

Last night I pulled another $400 from the ATM, so we wouldn't have to dip into our emergency cash during the upcoming storm. Overkill perhaps, but that's okay

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I keep some on hand. I look at it as one month of typical income is a good start. Ideally you are making more than your expenses as a standard. That leaves a little wiggle room when all hell breaks loose. Granted if you are not comfortable with that kind of cash laying around... the simple answer is DONT leave it laying around. It's not sitting on my nightstand. It's not even in my safe... it's in another location very close by that I can trust to not be targeted but still be secured.

Just my .02

Ha! Your refrigerator!

No, it is not. Sounds like a knee jerk reaction from someone who has too much cash sitting making money for other people.

I had a lot of folks call BS when I told them to pull their 401K's in 2006-2007, most didn't, several lost 10's of thousands of dollars and even more, that had taken them years to build up.

Watch and learn.

Just one of hundreds of thousands  of links if you bother to google this subject

".....In February, the White House released its “Annual Report on the Middle Class” containing new regulations favored by Big Labor including a bailout of critically underfunded union pension plans through “retirement security” options.

The radical solution most favored by Big Labor is the seizure of private 401(k) plans for government disbursement — which lets them off the hook for their collapsing retirement scheme.  And, of course, the Obama administration is eager to accommodate their buddies.

Vice President Joe Biden floated the idea, called “Guaranteed Retirement Accounts” (GRAs), in the February “Middle Class” report.

In conjunction with the report’s release, the Obama administration jointly issued through the Departments of Labor and Treasury a “Request for Information” regarding the “annuitization” of 401(k) plans through “Lifetime Income Options” in the form of a notice to the public of proposed issuance of rules and regulations. ....(pdf)"

The point being that cash won't miracle the gas out of the ground, right?

I've bought other stuff during an outage though. A calculator or scratch pad will add up my total just fine.

On a different but related point, after the 2008 ice storm I noticed that seemingly every local mom and pop convenience store had a propane cylinder exchange cage outside. That's one of the reasons I finally got off my duff and finished converting two of my backup gensets to tri-fuel. Ease of fuel storage was the other big reason of course, but it was awfully nice to not have to depend on gasoline for power. Several of the convenience stores around here have gensets themselves, so if I had needed more propane I could have found some much more easily than gasoline.


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I had an aunt that did that. She always told my uncle that if anything ever happened to her to clean out the freezer. She beat it into his head over and over and he thought she was going crazy. Right up until the day she said she wanted a new car so she went to the freezer and there was a little over $300,000 wrapped up in tin foil bricks in the big freezer downstairs. Needless to say my uncle was surprised.

Back to the original topic, at least 1 months bills to cover the bills and additional $2,000 if possible for other expenses.

BS is EXACTLY what it is.


you have no idea whatsoever what my financial standing nor financial strategy is, and i would not be so ignorantly obtuse to assume that i would know yours.  


it's unbelievable that you are portraying this as a good idea.  had those people who listened to you instead remained invested through the dip, they would have not only avoided taking a huge tax hit at their current marginal income rate on top of the 10% penalty for early withdrawal, but in fact had they done nothing with their accounts they would be FAR better off in terms of retirement assets now.  ergo, your errant advice cost them dearly.


you don't even understand the very links you are posting.

the origin of the GRA concept comes from an academic named Teresa Ghilarducci;  you can and should read her entire original 2007 treatise on this topic, here:
http://www.gpn.org/bp204.html

i'll spare you the entire lecture but the foundation of it is based a lot of "equality isn't working" economics wherein the current 401k/403b/related instruments are panned because they favor higher income earners.  i can sum it up as "the average family making 45K per year can't afford to contribute 15K a year to a 401k, whereas a family making 145K per year can afford to contribute 15K a year to a 401k;  therefore, the current 401k, as structured, is not a good retirement system because only the higher earners get to take advantage of the tax advantage."  

i can 100% guarantee that you will find some/many ARFCOM'ers that agree with this hypothesis.  


yeah, no.  no one, including me, favors bailing out underfunded union pensions except the union members expecting a pension.  the only problem is that those folks vote.


i'll bet you a ARFCOM membership that you can't find anything related to, and i quote, " seizure of private 401(k) plans for government disbursement".  

so –– have at it:

1) .gov links to currently pending house or senate floor legislation which either involves seizing of private 401k/IRA assets /or/ mandating a specific investment approach within a 401k/IRA?

2) .gov links to proposed draft bills which either involve seizing of private 401k/IRA assets /or/ mandating a specific investment approach within a 401k/IRA?

3) .gov links to any sitting or former senator's or congressman's platform page which is advocating seizing of private 401k/IRA assets /or/ mandating a specific investment approach within a 401k/IRA?

4) .gov links to a white house executive order draft which either involves seizing of private 401k/IRA assets /or/ mandating a specific investment approach within a 401k/IRA?

5) .gov links to verifiable quotes from any current or former member of the executive branch which either involves seizing of private 401k/IRA assets /or/ mandating a specific investment approach within a 401k/IRA?

6) .gov links to IRS notices of proposed tax law change which either involves seizing of private 401k/IRA assets /or/ mandating a specific investment approach within a 401k/IRA?

go!


wrong.  academic Teresa Ghilarducci coined the term years before Biden was VP.  


stop reading some blogger's attention grabbing story with a sensationalistic headline (which serve to increase hits to the blogger's pages and therefore correspondingly increase the blogger's advertising revenue) and READ THE ACTUAL DOCUMENTS pertaining to the fundamental concepts.

now then clearly you have not read these documents because ANYONE who digs just 1 inch into the "gov't will seize 401ks" story has comes to the same conclusion:  it doesn't work. but before i educate you on why it obviously won't work, let's look at the actual text of the RFI that Treasury put out:


the (potentially misguided) goal of this RFI can be summed up as:


what this (and further text) is saying is that folks who retire may desire another investment option for distribution of their own retirement assets, and perhaps the gov't could provide one which would have the (very lofty) goals of reducing asset risk to zero and concurrently staying ahead of inflation.  if you paid attention for 30 minutes in any undergraduate investment class, you realize that achieving these two diverse goals is almost a mathematical uncertainty and statistically can not work over long periods of time.  and, clearly, if you hand the GRA car keys to the government it is sure to implode.  

on that basis alone every financier looks at the proposal and says "herpy derpy" –– it sounds like social security v2.0, except in this scheme the retiree gets to personally save the money for 65 years and then turn over the management of said money (perhaps some, perhaps all) to the gov't.  now then, a certain segment/demographic of the population COULD in fact want this.  my mom is 84 years old and planning to live to 184 –– and market risk is "bad" for her.  her municipal pension?  underwater.  those safe corporate bonds she had?  GM defaulted.  reliable mortgage backed bonds perhaps?  bottom fell out.   dividend producing equities?  forget it.  so there is a "market" for this type of no-risk/low reward product –– when an insurance company annuity is looking "shaky", perhaps the US gov't could do better.  i'll not take that option, thanks.

as you can see, the RFI had NOTHING to do with seizure of your private property –– namely your 401k assets.  you got sucked into the blogosphere where attention is everything.  

but suppose we take your extreme view and we wish to continue to understand the effects of the US govt seizing the 401k's/403b's/TSP's of everyone?  what would happen? did you really stop and think about this?

IRA's and 401k's and TSP's are "containers" –– they are not investments themselves. these tax-advantaged containers hold discrete investment instruments –– such as stocks, bonds, CDs, and so on, including government and municipal bonds.  to an individual investor, those constituent investments make up a retirement portfolio.

but in your scheme the government "seizes" these assets, all of them. great ... now they, what, sell all the stocks and sell all the bonds to raise cash? to whom? at what market value? i could go on, but as you can see by extrapolation this scheme doesn't work. no matter how you figure it the IRA's and 401k's "in bulk" are worthless to anyone. they make up a good portion of the US equity and credit markets. you can't buy the entire market much less sell the entire market.   the market price of an individual instrument is the intersection of supply (sellers) and demand (buyers).  if there is one big seller and no buyers, there is no price floor.  this is the case with stocks, bonds, or Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice.

so say the govt wants to confiscate our 401k's/IRA's/TSP's for the cash, to repay the deficit or buy F22's or wallpaper the whitehouse.    and, let's say the federal government, via confiscation, own 90% of the outstanding shares of IBM.  now they want to sell them all for the cash. work it out, and tell us what happens.   as i have shown earlier, confiscation results in a systemic crash –– there is one big seller and no buyers.

see, that's the problem. the gov't didn't confiscate 14 trillion dollars. they confiscated 14 trillion dollars worth of equities, bonds, CD's, cash, and misc. there is no way to dispose of it all towards economic gain. there are no net buyers. hence, the intrinsic value is low. moreover, should this broad market takeover by the federal government actually take place, foreign investment in the US would go to zero –– further depressing equity and bond prices.

i guess i could summarize this situation as follows: you can't have a stock market nor a bond market where one party holds a significant majority of the outstanding issues. even if that party is "benevolent" there are no (or not enough) trading partners and the result is that there is no price floor.

the moment the government seizes 14 trillion dollars worth of equities, bonds, CD's, cash, and misc, it's game over for EVERYONE –– the federal government included. the equity and bond instruments themselves are now worth next-to-nothing, the tax stream previously being made off of those privately held investments is now gone, and the primary credit market funding mechanisms for corporations and municipalities alike are now destroyed.

you'll have to tell me now how this scenario somehow benefits the people who want to stay in power, or other people that want to be in power.

anyway, if you want to argue your case for gov't 401k seizure, you are going to need a bit more than a blog headline.

ar-jedi

n.b.
interestingly, the people warning that "the gov't is coming for our 401k's/IRA's, so i cashed out my 401k/IRA" –– well, they become benefactors of the redistribution system then. that is, in theory the confiscated 401k/IRA monies are given to those who didn't have 401k's/IRA's in the first place, right? ergo, these folks should just stop the complaining about it, let it happen, and wait for their redistribution handouts. i don't know why they are even worrying about it, as it benefits them.

the only real downside to this "wait for it to happen" approach is that if it *doesn't* happen, you receive no redistribution handouts and you are on your own financially –– which you should have realized and planned for from the start.

TLDR.

Keep drinkin' that kool-aid my man! Oh Yeah!

it's too bad you DR, there was a free membership offer for you!  


just what i thought.  you got nothing.  

ar-jedi

seems like an awful lot of $ under the mattress not earning anything

10k liquid in the bank gets me about .25% these days.

Having a few grand at home isnt costing much.

i might be able to get .5 to.75% in a CD, but that ties up my money in a shit investment.

you want to  know how much to keep at home?



Keep what you are comfortable with. For me, its $1250

lol. Oh boy oh boy... There's plenty ar-jedi. Plenty. Just not everyone of us feels like arguing with someone who is as far out there as you when it comes to politics. This is a gun board after all.

Your hero, Teresa Ghilarducci, is a communist who would like to do away with private pension plans. Period. Her words, not mine btw.

For most of us middle of the road guys that's just a total turn off.

I understand that you're very sympathetic to her position. That just makes me cringe and go to another topic. After all, you won't be able to convince me that a communist is right when it comes to financial matters and I won't be able to show you the errors of your ways either. You have proven that multiple times in other treads.

So, let's just agree to disagree. You stick with the communist and I prefer a more moderate approach to financial matters.

I keep 2k in the safe for emergency puchases like filling up my two empty 55 gallon gas drums if things get hairy.

$4 - $5 K, split in three different locations

$1K in the fire safe, $1K - $2K in the bottom of the gun safe.  $2K and a stainless .38 special in....

If there's plenty, put up or shut up.  I don't think you can prove anything with the perfectly reasonable criteria ar-jedi has provided.

I've read plenty of his financial posts, and ar-jedi is NOT a communist.  I have a hunch that he's better off than most people on this board, but that we'd probably never know it if we met him on the street or lived in his neighborhood.  I for one will continue to max out my 401k and Roth IRAs for myself and my wife.  I intend to have a nice long retirement without any change in my standard of living.  Keep up the good work ar-jedi.  I love it when you get on a roll.

you have the opportunity to prove me wrong.  actually, it's not proving me wrong that's the issue –– another poster has stated, in effect, that the gov't is planning to seize 401k's; as i illustrated in detail above, this is neither a current plan nor does it work out economically if implemented.  in other words, it's BS.  hence, if you have supporting information which shows how and why the gov't plans to seize 401k's –– well by all means post it, son.


go on.  i don't think that i have ever posted ANYTHING related to politics.  link to my "far out" ideas?   in fact, the only reason i give a crap about politics is that it usually gets in the way of economics and finances –– which i do care about from a personal perspective  


i'll bet you a ARFCOM membership that you can't find a post of mine that supports anything related to her approaches.  

i'll start with the following 18 month old thread as ballast:
http://www.ar15.com/forums/t_1_5/1184393__ARCHIVED_THREAD____The_future_of_pensions__401k_s__IRA_s_______let_s_discuss.html&page=2#i28275591



name calling versus providing a supporting argument?

ar-jedi

And another thread goes into the GD realm.... nice.

Anyway, back on topic.  I can't believe people are posting how much they cash they keep on hand - all bravado aside of it's protected by x, y, z - on another site (Commander Zero's notes from the bunker), he asked about this cash being put back being new or old style.  Guess a guy came in and bought something using all old style currency, nice and crisp.  It raised enough of a eyebrow for him to post about it.  

So here's a question, should one change out the old style currency for the new style so it isn't obvious you have a stash of cash?

Purse swinging - IBTL

I would change the bills to match the look du jour

Circle-jerk bitch-slapping with crazy economic ideas aside...

Actually I got plenty, you were and are incorrect about pretty much everything you posted. I believe brevity is the soul of discretion, and anything that needs a thousand words would be better off in pictures, but then again I would expect long-winded diatribes to be the sword of someone pretentious enough to call themselves a jedi, lol, you crazy nerds.

I spent several years trading stocks for a living, basically an 18 hour a day job, I know more about the financial system than I ever wanted to know, the people I counseled to dump 401K's and didn't (because they were indoctrinated wage slave monkeys from the get-go with no guts), lost tens of thousands that they have NEVER gotten back, to call that crash a "dip" is some bullshit Obama-nonsense if I ever heard it. The people who did pull, paid a small penalty, and then asked me what they should do next, my answer: GOLD.  Do I need to go on about what happened next junior?

I spent a lot of time dealing with Tim Geithner's BS, Sheila Bair's BS and more, learned just how crooked Moody's and other ratings agencies really are, learned of the cronyism that goes on in FDIC seizures and sales.

Anyone who thinks the scenario I posed earlier in this thread can't happen, is as naive as the child that was born yesterday, this country is deep into a huge ongoing smash-and-grab, and it won't stop until everything is gone.

This is not rocket science here, it doesn't take a "jedi" to discern what's happening, it's plain old basic as hell guns-n-butter economics i'm proposing, that any child should grasp as their first lesson. Money in the bank, paper cash, 401K's, IRA's are not even as good as butter, they rely completely on the status quo NOT changing, when your money is in the bank, it's NOT your money, read the fine print for god's sake, don't be stupid and hard-headed. My money is in hard assets, it will not only still be here, available and under my control if the SHTF, it will be worth MORE.

Feel free to TLDR this post

Here in hurricane and NorEaster land $1000 bucks at least. Not uncommon for some piece of my families property to get damaged during a storm. Currently battling the deluge of rain here to keep a $15000 oil furnace in the basement from flooding.

Please cite your sources for the seizing of 401K 's . I work in the financial industry and have never heard a peep about it.That is not to say he did not say it but the financial markets would be repeating it over and over if he had.

I do agree with you that Geitner is a world class POS,along with Bernanke.

I try to keep enough to get a hotel for a couple nights and live out of a vending machine when i leave the house.  we also keep a month or so liquid just in case.

633,000 links on Google for that search term, I just don't have time or desire to do a full investigation, I mentioned it as a possibility, just one of probably a dozen scenarios I could name. Agreed on Bernanke for sure. If you work in the financial industry, you know it's a possibility, you know what will happen if Moody's or S&P or Fitch drops the hammer on the US rating.

To get back to the point of this thread before it gets de-railed too far, it's pretty simple really, as anyone who was in New Orleans when Katrina hit could tell you, there were no banks open, no working ATM's, and even if you HAD money, no place to spend it. I didn't see any of the national bank chains flying in with helicopters full of bags of money for their poor depositors, much less food/water.

And again, i'm stressing what has not been contested in this thread, money in the bank IS NO LONGER YOUR MONEY SURRENDERABLE UPON DEMAND IN ALL CIRCUMSTANCES. It is the banks money, and at best they only have 10% of it anyway.

You are FAR better off, having your money invested in some property, supplies, off-grid power, food, water, guns and ammo. The bank money should be an absolute minimum, the whole question of this thread is convoluted is what i'm trying to say, the question is not how much money you should have outside of the bank for emergencies, the question is how much should you have IN, and the answer is a bare rolling minimum to get your paychecks cashed and maybe pay a month's worth of bills. Paper is not money, it's an IOU, a promissory note, nothing more, and our currency is a fiat currency not even issued by our own government, with zero intrinsic value on it's own.

Actually, he's an asshole.  He keeps posting pics of his place all over this forum and the work he does around his place and I have to keep cleaning up the drool off my keyboard.  

He's also from NJ and as a former NJite myself, there's gotta be something messed up with him for living in that state.

Yeah, i thought about putting some of my cash into a CD then realized the amount of interest i would make would be less than the cost of the gas needed to drive to the bank and set up the CD account

If you need to harbor wealth, buy silver.

Keep cash on hand as the folks in te n.e. found out.

True.

For those who are always short of cash, I would pay the bill with a debit card when going out to eat with friends. Then take the currency and sock it away in the safe when I get home. This way you get a lot of 20's and small bills that will be easier to use when the credit card machines and possibly banks go down. The wife prefers to collect hundreds so between her and me, we are setup pretty well.

My recommendation is to first identify and track what you spend for local things - food, gas, household supplies - in an average month, then try to shoot for 2-3 months' worth.  Granted, a lot of discretionary stuff - coffee, junk food, movie rental, whatever - would fall along the wayside but 1. prices of available goods might be significantly higher, 2. you might get better service for various things if you can outbid your competitors (i.e you might need to bribe some guys for shit) and 3. it might last longer than you think.  

This is strictly for getting through the worst of something like Sandy.  It has nothing to do with PMs (that's a separate concern IMO and has more to do with long-term wealth preservation) or credit cards (I keep one for emergencies only, the plan being to GTFO if things last too long and set up the family in a hotel in the first unaffected town - credit line is big enough that we could stay for a month or more).

Got caught up reading the drama.

For the cash on hand.

I say what ever you can comfortably afford, to cover living expenses
and any emergencies that you think you might encounter.
I would also keep in mind your location, your homes security,
and could you afford to lose the amount of money if stolen.

If you do keep a large amount at your home,
I will need your address, where the spare house key is, and the
exact location of said money, you know just because.

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Personally, I like to have 1 month of all living expenses, including mortgage, on hand.  Gives me peace of mind to know I can be completely fine for one month should a SHTF situation occur - job loss, car accident, piano falling out of the sky, whatever.  If I need cash or I really want to buy something, I can use it as a slush fund if need be.  Girl Scout cookies get purchased from these funds every year.

Good point earlier about having enough money to live in a motel for a couple of weeks. I am not a believer in a national calamity, but local storms and or disasters are what I am planning for.

BTW, the last crisis I needed to get into my cash was when both of our debit cards, from different  banks were hacked so luckily we had a couple thousand to keep us going.

First, off, I didn't reserect this thread.  But I meant to post a response before to the absurd claim before.

There 2.6 million (4x) hits on poultry hormones.  But no chickens in north american are fed hormones.
#1) It's illegal (because no one has every argued that it should be allowed)
#2) It's impractical (hormones are normall injected- how do you give shots to 40,000 chickens on a farm and repeat every7 weeks)
#3) No one makes hormones for poultry
#4) It wouldn't work.  Chickens are bred to be so fast growing that their body can barely support the growth rates today.  If they grew any faster, we would have to aircondition their house.  Tunnel ventilation with evaporative cooling is required today tp keep modern birds alive.

Yet there are 2.6 million pages discussing it.  95% of the people I know don't care about hormones in meat, yet we get 2.6 million hits.  Most people I know would be concerned about 401(k) seizure either because they participate in one or are adverse to the government seizing private property.  Yet only 0.65 million hits.  So on the "calibrated by pountry science" hit meter scale, this claim must be false.
 
Besides anyone who claims somethign is true because it is repeated on the internet a bunch of times, is poorly informed at best.  Oh yeah, fake moon landing gets 1.2 million hits, so I gets it has twice the credability as a 401(k) seizure?