#especially when they pull a statistic out of their arse as if putting a number in makes them look smart

[earl-grey-love]

I hate being on the internet and being constantly exposed to people's hot takes on important shit. Like people will come out with the most unhinged nonsense and die on their hill as if it makes a lick of sense.

[surviveinthewildcasting]

Money - What happens if it all goes away?

Think about the monetary value of your checking account, savings account, retirement accounts.  Hopefully your balances are nice and healthy, especially after the normal expenditures of the Christmas Season.  Now imagine if you will all of those balances simply gone, wiped out never to return.  The thought is almost so ridiculous we barely give it credence, like that could never happen so why even consider it?  My friend if you are reading my blog, part of you knows that it is entirely possible in some aspect.

A few weeks ago I went out to lunch with my friend at one of those hip little cafe type places where people love to go and are willing to pay 5 dollars for a 50 cent cup of coffee.  I ordered a salad / bowl of soup and got the token glass of water (trying to avoid soda).  I went to the register to pay and my card was declined.  I told the man to swipe it again as this surely must be a mistake, declined again.  By now I’m still not realizing the obvious, and neither were the impatient people in line behind me who thought something like: “this bum needs to stop maxing out his credit cards, quit acting surprised that your card was declined, you know you are a broke destitute scumbag.”  A third try yielded the same result, and I was asked to step aside so he could service the people behind me.  Confused as ever I pulled up my checking account information (this was a debit card transaction) on my phone.  The balance was a robust 56 cents.  That was quite interesting considering my balance had been quite a bit more the night before. Had I purchased a 70 inch plasma HDTV while sleepwalking?  The answer was no so I quickly called my bank, only to find out that my card number had been compromised and my checking account had been cleaned out.  Needless to say, my friend had to cover me for lunch that day!

This post is not about how to protect your identity, or safe methods to use when shopping online as there are hundreds of articles about that already.  I simply became a statistic, my information (no matter how well I thought I protected it) was compromised and someone happily cleaned me out.  This is why banks have fraud departments, and also why I received all of my money back in about 5 days time.  The good news is that my checking account is not connected to my savings, so they were not able to access that cash via overdraft or other means.  Here is the point, what if there were no fraud departments to depend on?  What if the money was simply gone and never to return, with no recourse available to me the consumer?  I will tell you that during the 5 days I had a zero balance in my checking account life was a little bit of a pain in the arse.  I did not want to touch my savings account, so I borrowed a few dollars from my wife and begrudgingly pulled out one of my credit cards (I hate credit cards) and used it for items like gas and groceries.  Consider if there was no back up plan, what would I have done?

What is money?  It is a tangible object in paper and coin form, but for the most part it remains digits in a database on a screen somewhere.  Even the paper stuff only has value because we allow it to be worth something, we assign it a value in our minds based off of the market.  Our money belongs to us because the banks and other financial institutions who house those digits in a database say so.  If those databases were compromised, if those institutions were to suddenly say that our money no longer exists, what could we do about it?

Remember that scene from It’s a Wonderful Life where everyone busts down the doors at the local bank and demands their money?  Imagine that on a much larger scale, banks shutting down all over the country and your money just evaporating.

Before you start believing that I have gone off the deep end just realize that my recent experience with fraud got me thinking and I wanted to pass that along.  I am not suggesting that we lose faith in our banking systems, or that we shun debit cards or retirement accounts.  All I am saying is that we should all realize that everything in life to include or economy is fragile, and to put all of our faith into a one system is simply ludicrous.  This is why we prepare for various worst case scenarios, for SHTF / TEOTWAWKI.  The likelihood of an economic meltdown might be small (or is it?) but we should all realize that anything is possible.  I realized this last summer and started on my prepping journey, and I still have quite a ways to go before I feel truly comfortable in the progress that I will have made.  I do know one thing and that is in a post SHTF / TEOTWAWKI society you won’t be able to eat money and you sure as hell won’t be able to drink it.  I’m sure at some point society would eventually recover but if the value that we assign to money were to simply cease to exist, we will all be in a world of hurt.