What to do for "bartering" during/after collapse? Gold? Money? Goods?

Everyone seems to be talking about "the collapse" - how to prepare for it, whether it will be financial, oil or or simply total collapse of society as we know it.

Whatever happens, TPTB coloured bits of paper, or computer figures, will be worthless - since it's all imaginary and arbitrary.

Why not already start using your own currency within your local area? Use it to pay the guy who mows your lawn, or the girls who wash your car, or the plumber next door who fixed your tap.

Start using your own currency as far as possible. A suggestion would be similar to "Minuto's", but everyone carves thier own coins from wood. The coin is worth the labour/time it took to carve. E.G., you spend an hour carving a coin, you mark it worth "1 hr". You start by insisting you wish to be paid in this currency for some of the work you do. You insist on paying someone who has done an odd job for you in this currency. Soon, everyone in the area will happily use this "money" amongst themselves, and you have released yourselve's from Rothschilds worthless bits of coloured paper.

Anyone and everyone can either physically make thier own money, or "earn" it by being paid in it for work they do - either way, an hour, is an hour, is an hour. Irrespective of whether you sat for an hour and carved the coin, or whether you mended some-one's plumbing for an hour and they gave you a "coin" which you can spend elsewhere for it. The "hours value" is inherent in the "coin", the labour was spent to make it, so that coin genuinely has an hours labour embodied in it.

If a scum thief starts using a machine to make 80 coins a day instead of 8, and marking them as 1 hr instead of 1/10 of an hour, or "counter-fitting" some-one elses "coin", then they are treated as any scum - simply ostracised from the community and everyone refuses thier coins for trade - thier plumbing simply stays broken and they find thier own food, while everyone else trades fairly and lives comfortably and peacefully.

The immediate problem is how do you convert your "money" to the bwankers "money"? It's not possible to do accurately, since the bwankers "money" is worthless and arbitrary. Best suggestion would be to take an "average" value for labour - say $30.00 an hour, or whatever works at the time. Your "1 hr" coin would be worth $30.00 of bwanker monopoly money. From there you can then "convert" back to your currency when calculating the costs of materials for the work you have done.

E.G. It takes you 3 hours to fit LED lights in someones kitchen. The lights, wire and consumables costs you $45.00. At £30.00 per "hour" currency, this is 1 1/2 hours, so you charge 4 1/2 "hours currency" for the whole job. Once this type of "currency" starts spreading through, a "farmer" could easily calculate how many potatoes they get out of thier patch, how many hours labour it takes for them to tend the patch from planting to harvesting, and therefore fairly precisely how many pounds of potatoes is 1 hours worth of his labour.

You obviously cannot ever make a "profit", since no one is ever going to happily do two hours work, and accept a 1 hr coin in return - they will know straight away that they are being "done down" - where-as with TPTB bwankers money, nobody can tell if they are being stolen from or not, since the "value" of the "money" is arbitrary and could be worth anything.

When the economy collapses, your currency will still have the same value - it is fixed to labour, so is not subject to inflation, or any fictitious, fanciful, imagined or arbitrary value.

Let's stop flogging a dead horse and take some small steps toward working through the aftermath, starting now.

Discussion please - other idea's/thoughts/suggestions. Throw in the pitfalls, let's see how to overcome them.

I have used "carving wood" above, but in reality, I envision "coin" made of anything. It doesn't matter if you want to use pottery/clay and do your own intricate design, whatever each individual does, does.nt matter, as long as each "coin" embodies an hours physical labour. If firing clay for instance, one would have to include the labour taken to collect the fire-wood for the kiln and so on, the overall total of an 8 hours day of work, should result in 8 coins.

It is impossible to determine something's worth and value until it is actually being used to barter with. There is no way we could get out local communities to accept a new currency until they absolutely have to.

By the way, come collapse time, gold will probably be the last thing you'd want to have on you. It would be heavy, cumbersome and it does nothing to fulfill your basic needs of survival. Only after communities are reestablished with functioning trade networks, would gold be useful again.

Bartering your muscle i.e. labour, or any special skills and knowledge, or the product of that skills or knowledge. Ultimately, money would be reborn. The way humanity works requires a system of exchange.

Regards

I have a stash of about 15,000 rolls of toilet paper, when it all goes down
i will be rich! also don't forget the honey, doesn't spoil and sweet always
sells. The TP thing is a joke but honey i would wager would be a good
barter.

Yup.
It's skills that will be important when the shtf. Unless you want to trade that gold coin for a chicken.

What if some diabolical person makes an hour coin that only took him 10 minutes to make. One could equate that to what our own governments do.

Ill rely on the 4 Bs of bartering during shtf event
Booze
Butts
Bullets and
Bud

You're better off having sugar, salt, all kinds of seasonings (for rotting meats) and especially soap to barter than gold or even silver.
I can't remember the exact history but there have been times when playing cards were used as currency for a period of time.

I have said before that one day the only thing that will have true value is food and water and Items necessary to survive. How can gold really be that rare and precious, valuable if you can walk into any store and buy it? I would love to see communities come together and work together to get free from the worthless money that rules the world. But as long as there are people that will do anything for money we have a long road ahead of us.

a reply to: JHumm

In the initial shtf gold and silver will be great. Ppl will naturally believe that the govt will be by any minute to fix everything. They will see the intrinsic value in all its shiny glory. After about 7 months that will not be the case.

Now think long term.

Gold and silver will be worthless BUT not forever. Start a secret cache for future generations of the JHumm tribe.

For when the shtf, pigs, chickens and cattle. People need to eat. Skills to offer, black smithing, medical knowlage, and farming help. As far as gold and silver its hard to chew and herts my bowls.

Learn how to make moonshine.

Rare commodities usual do well even in the apocalypse.

The "collapse" would be when you have hyper-inflation. A short period when the currency becomes worthless and essential supplies go beyond being affordable. This happened in Malaysia years ago because they imported all their food. To buy food for a meal would involve a race from the ATM to get cash (shops won't accept credit cards at this time due to the delay in getting the money transferred) and spending it before it becomes worthless. Even then you might find that prices have gone up so much that you have to drop one or more items.

Looking at the way essential items like Obamacare are going up, it looks more like a slow collapse.

In a collapsed economy, if a loaf of bread is made available to you at $1000 how much bread could you buy with an ounce of gold?



If we make it through 2015, by the end of the fiscal year, it is very likely you will have the answer...

Food
Water
Weapons
Pharmaceuticals
Labour
If you have those you'll live.

a reply to: odaeio

In a true collapse, gold will be worthless, as it has no practical non-industrial application, save for being a heavy material (gold fishing weights come to mind). Silver will be worth much less than it is now, but has practical application in everyday survival use if other more choice metals are not available. Its semi-hard and will retain its shape somewhat well, can be machined, etc.

If you want a non-consumable (as in cannot be eaten) to invest in for the worst possible survivable scenario, invest in brass and lead, and devices that put them together, and devices that use them to their fullest effect.

Bullets, shells, guns, and reloaders will be invaluable to the community.

Also buy a lot of high quality powder and store them in sealed liquid/air proof containers. Im guessing once a real SHTF scenario plays out, creating high quality modern gun powders could be next to impossible, so what you start with, is what youll have.

And if you want a skill, try gunsmithing. A gunsmith in such a scenario would be priceless.

Dried Food, Medicine, Skills, Ammo, First Aid Materials, Salt, Water, Powdered Milk, Powdered Eggs, Clothing, Baby Necessities, Guns, Coffee, Tea, Chickens, ....the list goes on.

I used to think Silver or Gold but I'd rather have my family with a full tummy than a full pocket.

Peace

originally posted by: Krazysh0t
It is impossible to determine something's worth and value until it is actually being used to barter with. There is no way we could get out local communities to accept a new currency until they absolutely have to.

By the way, come collapse time, gold will probably be the last thing you'd want to have on you. It would be heavy, cumbersome and it does nothing to fulfill your basic needs of survival. Only after communities are reestablished with functioning trade networks, would gold be useful again.

Thanks for the input, but I don't really understand why we can't determine somethings value or "worth". The one obstacle I came accross is tools. Let's say it takes an hour to make a shovel, one could "sell" that shovel for "1 hr" currency, BUT that same shovel, over it's useful lifetime, would "save" the "buyer" many hundreds of hours labour, as opposed to him digging by hand? So, is the shovel "worth" 200 hrs, or 1 hr? I would say 1 hr, since the "buyer" could either "trade" that one hour labour to the person who made the shovel, or he could spend that same hour making his own shovel, hence I would "value" the shovel at "1 hr" currency.

If the whole world based thier respective currencies on labour, international trade would be easy. Also, the pricing of every "good" would be calculated on exactly the human labour required to produce it, from the mine digging the iron, to the smelter making it into blocks, to the engineering works making the sheets into vehicle body panels - exactly the same calculations would be done as they are today, with the exception of "profit". Banks would not be able to charge "interest", but would obviously charge "clerical fees" for administering the loan. Irrespective of the amount of the loan, the fees would remain the same, since the "labour" required to record the monthly repayment would be the same, whether that payment was 10 or 1000. Not a lot would need to change, and in fact, the accumulation of "capital" would still occur. One person could work 8 hours a day at thier "job" and collect 8 "coins", then go home and spend another 8 hours making a further 8 coins which they could "save up", where-as another person could work 2 hours a day, and spend the rest of the day on his couch. The one working harder would have 8 times more than the lazy one? So a form of "capitalism" still exists - only that no one could have more than the physical labour they can put in - no "super rich", but "welfare" would be non-existant, those wanting to "leach" off society would have no alternative but to work at least the minimum required for thier food, even if that "work" entailed just sitting "making" "coins" for a couple of hours a day. Even disabled people, who had use of thier hands, could "make" something towards thier own upkeep, by making or carving coins in thier home.

originally posted by: BlastedCaddy
What if some diabolical person makes an hour coin that only took him 10 minutes to make. One could equate that to what our own governments do.

Ill rely on the 4 Bs of bartering during shtf event
Booze
Butts
Bullets and
Bud

Yes, that's what I was saying - the "diabolical" person who produces a coin in 10 minutes, and marks it as worth an hour, would soon be discovered. Society would automatically rout them out, they would "ostracised" and people would soon know that that persons coin was only worth 10 minutes. Soon nobody would accept thier coin, and they would not be able to trade - this would happen automatically. The same as if we were trading in sugar, and someone was regularly giving a few pounds short in the pound, because they had fiddled thier scales. In times gone by they were litrally nailed to thier scales by the ears! Where-ever they went there-after, if they were seen to have scars on thier ears, no-one would trade with them - quite effective way of keeping honesty about, I would imagine! People who wore caps or head-coverings hiding thier ears were instantly dis-trusted!

originally posted by: JHumm
I have said before that one day the only thing that will have true value is food and water and Items necessary to survive. How can gold really be that rare and precious, valuable if you can walk into any store and buy it? I would love to see communities come together and work together to get free from the worthless money that rules the world. But as long as there are people that will do anything for money we have a long road ahead of us.

Gold originally was extremely effective - it was a "store" of labour, just more effective than using the "home-made" coins I have described. Basically, one cannot "make" gold, but one CAN find, dig and smelt it. Since it takes a great deal of human labour to find, dig and smelt, a small amount of gold represented a good whack of "hours" labour - hence it's "value". It was great for trading, since anyone who wanted to, could spend thier time either looking for gold, or they could spend the time labouring for someone else who had already found and smelted it, in exchange for the equivalent "hours" in gold.

If gold had been kept on that trading system, it would have been the best, but it wasn't and was very quickly "divorced" from the actual human labour value - wise, in order to enable the theft of labour system we have today.

Hence I am trying to figure something to replace it.