Re: So... I just spent all my paper IOU notes. My life's savings!
Stocks are volatile, to me, since they are subject to the whim of the banksters and fed. Inflation rises? Stocks rise. Some bubble pops? Stocks fall. Dollar collapses? Stocks fall. The Fed is printing 40 Billion (with a B) USD per month to buy bonds to try and emulate a negative interest rate. This exponential growth can't last. When the Dollar collapses, it will bring all the world's markets down with it.
Gold, real estate, firearms, long-storable food, and BTC should be safe from these collapses, albeit they won't earn you the same rate of return as the market... (except BTC, that'll go to the moon, of course
). The market is run by the fuckers that want us all to stay enslaved in the debt fiat bank-run oligarchy disguised as "Republic Capitalism." More than the above points, my heart-felt believe about not wanting to be a cog in that debt machine keeps me out of the markets. The notion that you must keep your money in their controlled and insider-manipulated stock system to keep your bank notes from losing value over time because their rigged fiat-printing insolvent money policy is not even a store of value makes me sick. I'll have no part of it, thank you.I agree on many things. If dollar collapses (which seems inevitable), the assets you mentioned will indeed be very valuable. But if you choose stocks like Coca-Cola or Procter and Gamble, which have raised their dividends for over 50 consecutive years, I'd say it would take a lot for them to decrease their dividends. Their prices can go down of course even if they don't cut dividend, but I find it very difficult to imagine a situation where you can buy Coca-Cola yielding > 4 %. Having that kind of dividend history makes prices of these kind of stocks very stable. And owning them provide you with annually growing stream of income.
I want to point out that I'm not against your decisions, it's just great to have a conversation about stocks with someone