Hi,

Welcome to my first blog post, and thank you for finding it 😊

The first thing you should know about me, is… I am what would be classed as the average Jo. I have spent most of my life self-employed doing manual work, with a small break of 4 years being employed in a middle management position, I don’t have any formal education or qualifications in finance or economics and to be honest, wasn’t even interested in either of them until about 20 years ago (I would have been about 35 then).

Like most people, finance and economics was never something I really thought about, and any time the subject came up I would glaze over and move on to more interesting things.

All this started to change though, about 2002. I had recently purchased a run-down property for a good price, and spent about a year refurbishing it, I then moved in and lived there for about 2 years.

During the period from when I purchased the property until about 4 years later, I could not help but notice the property market was rising at a ridiculous rate, my property had more than doubled in price, even considering the cheap purchase price due to all the work need on it. It was towards the end 2005 when I decided to sell the property and move into rental accommodation. Being single, this was an easy decision as I didn’t have to consult with anyone else, so after Christmas, around Feb 2006, I called the estate agent to get the ball rolling. The agent came round the next day and told me they had people waiting to buy this type of property and he could arrange viewings for the next few days (It was an old 2 bed terrace house in town but very nicely refurbished). The agent valued the property, several interested parties came to view it, and the property was sold within about 3 days. This was further confirmation I was making the right decision.

 

This is an archived image I managed to find on the internet.

Brings back some memories….

My-old-house

We all know what happened next, the property prices continued to bubble up for about another 6 months then the whole thing popped and came crashing down, taking the rest of the financial system with it. This was the 2008 financial crisis brought on by cheap debt provided by reckless and greedy banks’ lending to people they knew could not afford to repay, I had escaped in profit, just at the right time.

 

Having a gut feeling about the property prices was probably just a bit of good luck, and because I was not educated in finance or economics, I wasn’t sure what to do with my profit. It remained in the bank for a while, but I knew I needed to do something with it, that’s when I came across gold for the first time. I bought a few 1oz gold Krugerrands off eBay, the first one I purchased was £340 and it was amazing to hold this gold coin, I remember thinking how heavy it was for such a small coin and I think this was the point when my brain started to kick into gear.

Over the next 4 years I bought 20 of these coins, the last one I bought was about £850.00 and at that point I started to think they were getting a bit too expensive, so about 6 months later decided to sell them all. I listed them one at a time and they sold straight away, so then I decided to take photos of them individually and list all at the same time, I remember one of the buyers, who decided to purchase two of the coins, joked that I had flooded the market with them. But they all sold within about a week and I made a nice little profit from them.

It was buying these coins and experiencing the rise in price and then subsequent drop in price a few years later, before seeing the gold price start to rise again, that really got me interested in the reasons behind this price movement.

Basic finance and economics really are quite boring, until you start to get interested in it, then it becomes extremely interesting and quite addictive. This is where my mind has been for about the last 15 years. From then on I have read numerous books, hundreds of articles and watched hundreds of commentaries from various economists or gold experts over the years. I have included a page on this site which will show you many of the videos I watch and also a page with various interesting books to read which will all help you to get a better understanding of the real financial world we live in.

Warning!

Once you start to learn about the history of money, and the institutionalised corruption in the banking system, you will never look at things in the same way. But you will be a lot better off for it.

Throughout this website and on future blogs, I have attempted to cut out a lot of the noise and bring you the interesting bits, that will hopefully spark an interest in you to learn more.

If you have any comments or questions, please leave them below where I, or others can respond, and we can all help each other.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and I hope you come back for more.

Jon