I guess the best thing to do if you have a questionable past is to get your millions in cash or gold and hide it somewhere.  You never know when Big Brother will be making a grab.  I'm sure they will be doing a massive check on every winner to see if they have something to make an arrest and confiscation on. I don't think it should be just drug dealers who should worry.

That's an interesting viewpoint.  Probably has some merit, even, for folks inclined to worry about such things.

There's another side of the coin, however, which will be illustrated by the following anecdote dredged out of my personal experience:

I was a Y2K believer.  I thought civilization was going to collapse January 1, 2000, and I bet my all on it.  Seemed to make sense to me at the time, the cost of being wrong and it not happening being less than the cost of being right and not doing it.  I wasn't able to go both ways, so I bet all or nothing that Y2K would happen.

I cashed in two retirement systems that would have had me drawing about $4000 a month this year, had I left them in. 

I did everything much as you suggested.... kept cash for preps between January 1999 and Dec, 1999, bought gold for anything afterward, but didn't figure on needing much afterward.  My plan was to take all the cash left after the preps in and put it all into gold early in December, 1999.

I figured I'd be dying pretty quickly after the shelf-life on a particular medication I take daily ran out.  My intent was to set up a refugee camp where some of the survivors from the cities would have a shot at making it until things settled down a bit.

I built a cabin, under the floorboards of which I stashed the bulk of the cash in freezerbags.  Gold was going fairly high then because of other Y2k gold buyers, so I paid a premium for what of it I got, plus brokerage fees.

One day in October, 1999, I needed to get some building materials and other equipment required for the last phases of preparation.  I crawled down underneath the cabin, reached into the hideyhole, and came out with a handfull of confetti.

Seems the vermin had shredded the whole kit and kaboodle, slicker than a greased hog on ice.

Managed to recover about $5000 of it by sending it in to the US Treasury.  Between that and the gold I cashed in when Y2K didn't happen I was able to finance moving back nearer population centers and find ways to get by from then until now.

My point is, there are worse places than banks and investment firms for your money.

Jack 

(Edited in as an afterthought)

It's also worth mentioning, though this isn't the proper forum for it, that processed gold and paper currency are shockingly easy for a good dowser to locate.  The reason I moved the stash to underneath the cabin floor:  I had it inside an inflated truck tire buried under Y2K supplies.....Took my old bud Mel King about 15 minutes to locate it using a pair of swing-rods. 

J 

paranoia runs rampant

thought i was the only one

i do know enough not to bury money however, cash in a destroyed economy has little value. it is trade goods that have value

sorry about your 2000 investment philosphy tho rip

Thanks Sagan.  Nothing to be sorry for, however.  All part of the learning experience of living.  To have it different I'd have had to not do it, and not lived the best 16-18 months of my life.

No way I'd swap it for some other option.  (However, I wouldn't object to having done something with that money the rats ate.... almost anything from a steel box to a blackjack table would have been at least as satisfactory and might have made the years since a lot easier.  I hope nothing in any of my posts on this board suggests I don't think I am one REALLY stupid old tomcat)

Jack 

THIS SHOULD AND PROBABLY WILL BE APPEALED.

IT IS JUST A BAD CASE. I AM SURE THERE IS A LAWYER WAITING FOR THE  CASE!!

HAPPY THURSDAY...8/25....TO ALL MY FELLOW HAPPY GAMBLERS....

HI RIP......Your information  was extrememly interesting and informative.  However, in my State

"Maryland"...the police cannot take such Melodramatic Actions, "even with the warrant" unless and only unless they were "staking out" the house or establishment for several days and had seen and filmed quite a bit of "suspicious behavior" to give them just cause. I would have to imagine based on what you've told me, that apparently States rights differ from State to State. The Police here are very careful, because the statutes on Civil Rights are carried and held very high, and they do not want to be accused of Racial Profiling or violating anyone's Civil Rights.

If they were to "trash and destroy" a home or establishment  with "warrant in hand" and found nothing, they would be forced to reimburse the owner for any and all damages.  The Police and Sheriffs  Dept here don't enjoy being "sued" in Court anymore than we would.....And believe me, they would be sued harder than you could bleed a dollar dry.............hehheheheeehe.....

I guess the Bill of Rights was just a piece of short fiction written by our forefathers.

A crime is punishable by incarceration and/or fines.

Confiscation of assets by the government is specifically excluded in our Bill of Rights.

If I'm mistaken, please direct me to the source of your disagreement in the Bill of Rights or the Constitution of the US prior to any ammendments to these fundamental concepts of the United States of America.

It also used to be illegal to make alcoholic beverages...but that was an "ammendment" to our original Constitution and even then, they didn't take your house away for making gin in the bathtub although that house was purchased with a bathtub in it.

libra writes:
"The Police here are very careful, because the statutes on Civil Rights are carried and held very high, and they do not want to be accused of Racial Profiling or violating anyone's Civil Rights."
 
Drug dealers come in all races, trashing their property may be violating their civil rights but it's not racial profiling, maybe occupational or outlawing profiling maybe.  Successful drug dealers tend to blend into the neighborhood where they work and live.

RJOh

Successful drug dealers tend to blend into the neighborhood where they work and live.

The key word might be 'successful', and the way a person defines the concept.  Or things just might be different in other parts of the nation.  In NM, I'm not sure any drug dealer could be called 'successful' by any definition except financial. 

They tend to use their own products and sales to support their own use.  They tend to be wild and conspicuous in their behavior.  If they're meth users/cooks/dealers their behavior degeneration is compounded by the fact they go days without sleeping and the byproduct of extreme paranoia.

My old friend, Mel King was a major, financially successful marijuana grower and large-scale broker in New Mexico for many years.  During that time he was also a long-term heroin addict.  (He first became addicted to morphine while in the hospital recovering from wounds he got in the Marine Corps in Vietnam).  The only way Mel got away with what he was doing for so many years was by being considered a complete maniac, and by making certain the authorities got their fair share of the proceeds.  He drove around in a VW van with bullet-holes in the windshield from the inside

When he got busted in 1987, with 150 pounds in his house it was because he made himself too big a nuisance to be allowed to go on.  He was attracting too much attention. 

But even so, he never came to trial.  That 150 pounds of high-grade vanished from the evidence lockers.  The empty bags with his evidence numbers on them were found in the home of the policeman who made the initial stop during his arrest.  But someone murdered that policeman, probably for the marijuana, which is how they happened to find the empty evidence bags.

While he was in jail awaiting bail, Mel resolved to turn his life around.  He freed himself from heroin and when he was released he started a successful furniture business, did his best to stay clean for the remainder of his life.  Succeeded in being a trustworthy, successful man and one of the best friends I've ever had.

But he was never inconspicuous when he was into drugs.

Jack, . 

I got most of my opinions about the war on drugs from Mel King. 

From 1987, until he was murdered in December, 2004, he tended to become animated on the subject.  When he began growing marijuana in the late '60s it was a small-time business.  Marijuana growers could barely get by because prices were low and risks were high.

The war on drugs changed all that by driving the price up enough to make a wealthy man of him, without doing anything else.  Millions of young people, faced by the prospect of trying to get by flipping hamburgers, or making a lot of money dealing drugs, opt for the money.

We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars corrupting our institutions, corrupting our young people, driving the price continually higher, all the while making drugs ever more available at a street, jail, prison cell level.

That was what Mel believed from 1987 until he died, and it's also what I believe.

But what did he know? 

Jack