Historically gold has been the ideal currency to use when escaping across the border as this article outlines. But it also highlights another “currency” that can accomplish a similar feat today…
If You Need to Flee Today, Here’s How to Vanish With $1 Million
By Greg Wilson
Justin’s note: For today’s Weekend Edition, we’re handing over the reins to Palm Beach Letter analyst Greg Wilson…
They sewed little pieces of gold into their socks so they could pay for food…
The year was 1938.
The Kristallnacht pogrom raged through the Jewish ghettoes of Germany. Dozens of Jews were killed. Thousands more were sent to Nazi concentration camps.
Five days after the massacre, British Jewish leaders appealed to their government to rescue children left orphans by the massacre.
The British government responded.
It eased immigration restrictions to admit Jewish children from Germany, Austria, and other countries under Nazi occupation. They were smuggled out via train and boat.
It was called Kindertransport (children transport).
Jewish refugee children arrive in London in 1939
All told, nearly 10,000 children escaped Nazi occupation under the plan.
They couldn’t take much with them when they fled. Yet they still needed money to pay for essentials once they arrived to safety in Britain.
Leo Metzstein is a survivor of the scheme. He said some of the kids came up with an ingenious plan.
“Lots of the children had little bits of gold sewn into their socks and hidden inside their shoes so they could eat when they got to England,” he said.
A few gold bits were sufficient for the Jewish children to buy food.
But what if you had to flee a repressive government (or for any other reason) and wanted to take your entire life savings with you? How would you do it?
Would you be able to sew it all into your clothes?
What if I told you there was a better way…
What’s the Best Way to Flee With $1 Million?
Let’s say you had $1 million in assets and needed to get out of Dodge right away.
Would you have time to convert your life savings into gold or cash before you fled?
For the sake of argument, let’s say you had $1 million in gold hidden in a safe on your property.
The Feds are en route to your home. And they plan to confiscate whatever they find of value.
Could you sew all that gold into your clothes… like the Jewish children fleeing Nazi repression did?
That’s just not practical…
Remember the crook who stole a bucket of gold flakes from an unlocked armored truck in New York? The bucket was worth $1.6 million. It weighed 86 pounds.
Try lugging that around with you.
What if you had $1 million in the bank? You could convert that to cash, right?
Well, not so fast…
If you stuffed $1 million in $20 bills into a garbage bag, it’d weigh 110 pounds. That’s more than the bucket of gold flakes.
And good luck trying to withdraw $1 million from a bank without getting noticed. If you tried to take out just $10,000, the bank would immediately alert the Feds.
There are other options out there…
You could convert your life savings into art, stamps, vintage cars, fine wines, or precious jewels like diamonds.
But they each have high risks: They can be damaged, stolen, lost.
Some of these assets aren’t portable. And others aren’t liquefiable… meaning you couldn’t readily find buyers for them or carry them around easily. (Try hawking a rare Norman Rockwell painting without an auction house. It won’t be easy.)
If I needed to flee with $1 million, here’s what I’d do…
How to “Teleport” Your Life Savings
If I needed to flee quickly and take my life savings with me, I’d use bitcoin.
Here’s why…
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies are nothing more than digital money.
You can store them on your computer or mobile device. Another way is to hold your cryptocurrencies offline in “cold storage.”
[Cold storage is when you put a cryptocurrency in a wallet. The safest type is a paper wallet. You can print out your private key and password and store it in a safety deposit box. Or you can put the information on a thumb drive and put that in a secure place.]Cryptocurrencies are also stored anonymously on the blockchain. So it’s difficult for someone to hack into your online account or confiscate your money.
With bitcoin, you can move $1 million just as easily as you could move $1.
With one click of a mouse, you can send your life savings anywhere in the world… securely, anonymously, and almost instantaneously.
It’s like having your own gold transporter…
If it’s in cold storage, you could upload $1 million to your thumb drive. It’s like carrying $1 million in a device the size of a cigarette lighter…
So if you wanted to vanish with $1 million today, I’d recommend you do it with bitcoin.
No other asset offers the combination of portability, liquidity, security, and anonymity that it does.
It’s the perfect “chaos hedge.”
Regards,
Greg Wilson
Analyst, The Palm Beach Letter
Justin’s note: This cryptocurrency market is a speculator’s dream, and it’s going through the roof right now. Already this year, some of the best little-known cryptos have shot up as much as 1,900%.
Casey Research founder Doug Casey has taken notice. He recently told me, “I see a speculative bubble building up in this area, and it’s one that I would like to take advantage of.”
Now, he’s going to do something he’s never done before. On Thursday, April 20, Doug is participating in a one-time-only cryptocurrency training webinar. Click here for all of the event details, including a $250,000 Bitcoin giveaway.