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BARTER AND INFLATION

Investing money used to be pretty easy.  Buy a duplex or triplex in poor shape while you were young and in good shape, live in one as you fixed up the whole thing.  As you gained renters you doubled down on your mortgage and in ten or fifteen years you have no debt.  From then on, you kept the place up and had an income for life.  Alternately, if you weren’t as handy with repairs, you buy a section of land, bribe the politicians for a favorable zoning, and rent out RV spaces.  Nowadays, it isn’t really easy to get a mortgage.  The banks are busy playing with derivatives and getting money from Washington, so that leaves little time to process mortgage applications.  Plus, far better to have a giant corporation with a line of credit be the investor in rental properties.  Not that you’d want to get into debt anyway.  And not that you could, with half the pay of seven years ago.  And as jobs disappear, so do renters anyway.  Now, far better to just downgrade your expectations.  The economy is going to implode, and being a landlord isn’t a great occupation once the fires from looting start ( and your insurance company goes bankrupt ).  I’m talking “downgrade to a personal consumption level”.  We’ve already talked about investing in skills and their tools, so now let’s talk about investing in inflation busting barter items.

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Barter items have been covered extensively in survivalist circles, but that’s a currency substitution deal.  You know what I’m talking about.  Cigarettes and booze and rimfire ( back when it was affordable ) and the like.  My latest and greatest brain fart had been about learning way old school skills and investing in the books covering those and the specialized tools needed ( I’ll get that up in book form at Lulu.com one of these days ) as a way to invest in a better barter item.  The latest we will cover is investing in barter items that rely exclusively on modern petroleum inputs to make them exponentially cheaper than any version of them previous to or following the Oil Age.  First up are bike parts.  Yes, I know, there were no bikes long ago.  But there where horses and mules and camels and unless you were a nomad, where pack animals ate waste plants and procreated naturally, those were very expensive options for transportation ( because in an agricultural area, animals competed with human crop soil to a degree ).  Most poor people walked.  Or better yet, never ventured too far from their homes and fields.  A bicycle made personal transportation extremely cheap.  And while humans will once again contract into small villages surrounded by fields, or go nomad, until then they are so spread out that bicycles will be very useful for a very long time.  Next article I’ll cover bikes a bit more, then we’ll talk about grains, coffee, plastic, insulation and the like.  Just keep in mind these are items you park your money in before the currency is devalued.  It is a saving account, not a currency substitution.  More next article.

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