Here we go again, close to my home this time. Thieves dug through the wall of a bank vault and looted safe deposit boxes, taking a lot of gold with them:
Several times now, I have posted similar reports, only to be told: "What, me worry?"
It is time for some list subscribers to put on their thinking caps and take action to insure the contents of their safe deposit boxes. Contrary to what many of us seem to believe, the contents of safe deposit boxes are NOT covered by the bank's insurance. Banks have no idea what is in your SD box and take no responsibility when the contents go missing.
I googled "safe deposit box insurance" as opposed to gold coin insurance. Previous threads on this topic fizzled out because it turned out to be very expensive to insure coins. However, I discovered that it is NOT so expensive to insure safe deposit boxes!
The first link that popped up was https://safedepositboxinsurance.com. I don't know anything about them, but apparently they will insure safe deposit boxes for a set dollar amount, and you don't have to tell them the contents. The company has an A- BBB rating and has apparently provided insurance to some banks, so they're presumably legit. Here is some of the fee scale:
So if you have $20,000 in gold, the fee would be the equivalent of an ER of 0.375. Very reasonable compared to IAU, or to the 2%+ that coin insurance would have cost.
I presume I might even be able to get a better deal by adding coverage onto my homeowner's policy, or I could simply ask the bank to point me in the right direction.
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch." -- Benjamin Franklin
At $100 per year for $40k insurance why not split your gold coins into different safe deposit boxes, geographically diversified, for $20/year each box, or whatever the cost is to you? You don't need to visit your boxes often if they are "full" with your max holdings per box, so spreading them out isn't much logistical cost and provides better insurance than some third party company that probably has never paid a single claim out in the history of their business due to how rare safe deposit thefts are.
The likelihood of any one safe deposit box being broken into is astronomically small. So small that it makes sense to self-insure. While you may not be able to withstand losing all of your gold, you can withstand losing 10% of your gold. So split your gold across 10 safe deposit boxes (or 3 or 50 or whatever makes sense depending on your risk level and how much gold you have).
Most likely worst case scenario is you lose one of the boxes. If you lose all boxes at all banks simultaneously then I bet the world is so messed up that the insurance won't pay out anyway.
What kind of security system did that bank have if thieves had enough time to not only crack the vault, but then crack individual boxes once they got into the vault?
As a thought experiment, if you're a thief looking at a wall of safe deposit boxes and there are four sizes of box, which ones are you going to crack if you only have time to crack a few? I would think that they would hit the largest ones, but I may be wrong.
Q: “Do you have funny shaped balloons?”
A: “Not unless round is funny.”
goodasgold wrote:
Several times now, I have posted similar reports, only to be told: "What, me worry?"
It is time for some list subscribers to put on their thinking caps and take action to insure the contents of their safe deposit boxes. Contrary to what many of us seem to believe, the contents of safe deposit boxes are NOT covered by the bank's insurance. Banks have no idea what is in your SD box and take no responsibility when the contents go missing.
Don't worry, they ignored me too! I actually advocated not using banks because of inhouse employee fraud and no way to prove what was in your safety deposit box (they won't take your word for it and they intentionally have no records and the video tape can be "lost"), besides the fact the bank simply isn't legally responsible for the contents. What kind of fracking fiduiciary duty is that?!! Oh wait, there isn't any.
I like coinstar's solution, but that is extremely difficult to do in suburbia where many banks simply don't offer safety boxes anymore.
Last edited by MachineGhost on Thu Jan 08, 2015 2:01 am, edited 1 time in total.
"All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called 'Facts'. They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain." -- Thomas Hobbes
Disclaimer: I am not a broker, dealer, investment advisor, physician, theologian or prophet. I should not be considered as legally permitted to render such advice!
sophie wrote:
Goodasgold, you are absolutely right.
I googled "safe deposit box insurance" as opposed to gold coin insurance. Previous threads on this topic fizzled out because it turned out to be very expensive to insure coins. However, I discovered that it is NOT so expensive to insure safe deposit boxes!
The first link that popped up was https://safedepositboxinsurance.com. I don't know anything about them, but apparently they will insure safe deposit boxes for a set dollar amount, and you don't have to tell them the contents. The company has an A- BBB rating and has apparently provided insurance to some banks, so they're presumably legit. Here is some of the fee scale:
So if you have $20,000 in gold, the fee would be the equivalent of an ER of 0.375. Very reasonable compared to IAU, or to the 2%+ that coin insurance would have cost.
I presume I might even be able to get a better deal by adding coverage onto my homeowner's policy, or I could simply ask the bank to point me in the right direction.
Based on a previous thread I plan to at least get a quote from XL Specialty Insurance. From what I can tell that will be much, much less expensive than adding coverage onto my homeowner's policy.
