Buy gold this very minute scream the headlines

Ideally, ownership of gold and silver should be totally boring.

It should be akin to your homeowner’s insurance policy.

It helps you sleep at night.

Those who think Bitcoin is the new hard currency have had to contend with ongoing reports of exchange hacks and cryptocurrency thefts.

CNBC reports yet another one this morning.

How do you protect an asset that is outside of your control?

You can’t look at it, touch it, or heft it like bullion.

Owning Bitcoin must be the opposite of being able to sleep at night.

Cryptocurrency theft reports are becoming as common as counterfeit coins from China.

Always take ownership of your bullion, whether it is 50 gold American Eagles or 1,000 silver Canadian Maple Leaves.

Arrange to store the bullion coins securely and then let them do their job of insurance in peace and quiet.

That is the nature of insurance.

Too often, bullion buyers want validation when they buy gold and silver.

They want to say to themselves, “Prices have risen; boy, was I smart to buy.”

It’s insurance.

The only persons who should be validating your choice is your spouse and your father-in-law.

It is proof of your sense of responsibility.

It is proof of your ability to protect your family’s assets.

But no, we turn it into screaming stories about Weimar Germany set to happen again here next week.

It is now 10 years since the last financial crisis.

How did those Weimar stories of 2008, 2009, 2010 pan out?

How have they ever panned out?

But on they go.

There is something compelling about them.

We don’t daydream about our house burning down and how we will have been proved right to buy an insurance policy that protects against it.

Hey, the national debt is huge.

"It will all end badly," say another brand of stories.

I have been reading these for 50 years.

The national debt was huge when I read my first one.

It is still huge.

These are exciting stories to be sure. They get the blood pumping.

But do they lead to good decisions on your part?

Besides the insurance function, I recommend gold coins should be collected.

I remember when I obtained my first $20 gold piece.

It was a BU 1924 Saint-Gaudens. It was beautiful. I was awestruck.

But that wasn’t my first gold coin.

I worked my way up.

The first gold coin I ever bought was a tiny Mexican 2 peso.

I had a paper route.

What I earned I could spend on coins.

But even when gold was $35 an ounce, the $10 a week I got from delivering papers could not get me all the coins I wanted.

Current melt value of the 2 peso is $57.26.

The gold weight is only 0.0476 ounce as reported by the Standard Catalog of World Coins.

Then I bought British sovereigns.

These have nearly a quarter ounce of gold in them.

I decided I most preferred the King George V portrait rather than that of Edward VII or Queen Victoria.

A half century later, I still feel that way.

My portrait preference makes no difference to the gold value.

But coin collecting made my interest in gold my own and no one else’s.

That’s the validation I wanted to feel.

It also helps me sleep at night – just like my homeowner’s insurance policy.

Gold and silver should be soothing, not a cause of high blood pressure.

For entertainment, watch a movie.

Buzz blogger Dave Harper won the Numismatic Literary Guild Award for Best Blog for the third time in 2017. He is editor of the weekly newspaper "Numismatic News."