Safety of Safe Deposit Boxes

[TripleB]

If I was burying gold in the backyard, I'd also bury scrap metal all over the place to make it harder to find with a metal detector.

[MediumTex]

If I was burying gold in the backyard, I'd also bury scrap metal all over the place to make it harder to find with a metal detector.

Maybe bury it and then put some kind of antique tractor over the spot and tell people how proud you are of your new antique lawn ornament.  My experience has been that people tend to keep their distance from these rusting masses of metal because they don't want to get dirty of injured.

Here is what I am thinking (except don't be so obvious about something being buried beneath it):

[MediumTex]

See: Bloomberg: Hiding Gold in All the Unusual Places

...and the corresponding video mentioned in the article: YouTube: [Self] Gold and Silver storage, to do's and not to do's

That video was really something.

I like how in the background there is an American flag on one side and on the other side there is a wall tapestry featuring a ferocious bear.

In general, I love weird wall items that tell you a lot about the people who live in that space.

Remember this one from "The Royal Tenenbaums":

[David]

Is it a good idea to get insurance on gold if you store it yourself in your safe deposit box?  Or is that overkill, or otherwise a bad idea for some reason?

[craigr]

Is it a good idea to get insurance on gold if you store it yourself in your safe deposit box?  Or is that overkill, or otherwise a bad idea for some reason?

Bank insurance does not cover safe deposit box contents. So you weigh the risks vs. costs.

[MediumTex]

Is it a good idea to get insurance on gold if you store it yourself in your safe deposit box?  Or is that overkill, or otherwise a bad idea for some reason?

Gumby has posted on insuring gold bullion held in safe deposit boxes in the past.

You might search his posts and see if you can locate that information.

[murphy_p_t]

was reading an old (early 70s) HB book today.

He was very specific that the safe deposit box should not be part of a bank. He also was predicting the closing of the gold window & warned against buying gold in futures market (think MF Global).

I don't find much when I do an online (Startpage.com) search for a private vault. What should I be using in the search bar, or are they that rare?

[HB Reader]

was reading an old (early 70s) HB book today.

He was very specific that the safe deposit box should not be part of a bank. He also was predicting the closing of the gold window & warned against buying gold in futures market (think MF Global).

I don't find much when I do an online (Startpage.com) search for a private vault. What should I be using in the search bar, or are they that rare?

Private vaults and Swiss bank storage were indeed more viable storage options for many Americans in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  (The advice above appears to come from "How You Can Profit From the Coming Devaluation" which was HB's first book, published in 1970.) I think there are probably still some private safe deposit companies in the US, but I doubt they are very practical for most of us.  Even in the early 1970s when I first checked them out, private depositories were fairly rare, only available in a limited number of urban locations and were prohibitively expensive for most small investors.  Also I'm pretty sure even HB would've advised readers not to take everything he wrote in the early 1970s too literally forever -- or at least to apply some interpretation in light of nearly forty years of change.

His thinking, like everyone else's, changed and evolved over the years.  In the early 1970s, for instance, unrestricted ownership of gold bullion and many gold coins was still illegal and he had not developed anything like the PP concept.  The PP strategy was the evolution of his thinking coming out of his attempts in the late 1970s and early 1980s to hedge precious metals portfolios against what he believed were the short periods when the markets ran counter to what he believed was the major long term trend of successive inflationary monetary crisises leading to a return to some sort of gold standard.  By the early 1980s, he came to realize that it was folly to even assume we could reliably predict a long term trend like that.  

My general impression over the years from his newsletter was that as we moved away in time from the "demonetization" of gold in 1971-73 (as well as the bank closures of the 1930s), the danger of a sudden government gold confiscation program and bank closures became less and less likely.  Certainly not impossible, but less likely.  I think by the late 1990s he ended up viewing bank safe deposit boxes as one of the two or three more practical ways for most Americans to hold some portion of their physical gold.  Maybe not the only way, but certainly a viable alternative for a substantial portion of it.

What I would take away from the 1970's advice was simply that you should look for practical ways to hold your investments as directly as possible and to mininimize the number of potential obstacles between you and the asset.  

[Coffee]

This guy is in Vegas.  No way in hell am I leaving anything with him:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3pQcO3Gx84

(Not even for a free lollipop!)

[AdamA]

This guy is in Vegas.  No way in hell am I leaving anything with him:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3pQcO3Gx84

(Not even for a free lollipop!)

You weren't impressed by the retinal scanner?

[Coffee]

This guy is in Vegas.  No way in hell am I leaving anything with him:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3pQcO3Gx84

(Not even for a free lollipop!)

You weren't impressed by the retinal scanner?

"Wait, wait... I blinked..."

[Ad Orientem]

This guy is in Vegas.  No way in hell am I leaving anything with him:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3pQcO3Gx84

(Not even for a free lollipop!)

Wow!  Good judgment call.  This kind of advertisement sounds like it was directed at the Mob.  Seriously these kinds of places are often used by criminals.  A similar set up in Great Britain a few years back was raided by the police who found all kinds of illegal contraband there.  The poor saps who had perfectly legal valuables (including gold and jewelry) had to go to enormous lengths to "prove" to the police that their property was really theirs and gained legitimately.

The Swiss are a great contrast to this kind of arrangement.  They enforce very strict confidentiality, but they have done away with the old "anonymous" banking.  All Swiss bankers are now required by law to do a detailed due diligence check on any new customers.  And customers are required to provide documentary evidence showing the origin of their money.

Private high security storage is a perfectly viable option.  But you need to know who you are doing business with and you need to do your own due diligence.  And if they run their business on a "no questions asked" basis that's something I would stay away from.