Secret Silver Santa

Santa delivers silver?

This holliday season I decided to give the gift of silver as a present in two ways.  I did this as kind of an experiment .  First of all some friends got together and had a party  for the holidays and decided to do a "Secret Santa" gift giving exchange.  If you are not familiar the secret santa gift exchange works as such.  You bring a gift of a certain value or less (in this case it was $25 U.S.)  You draw numbers from a hat for each person present that brought a gift and get to select in turn a gift from the pile.  If you do not like your gift you may swap it for any other players gift  that they had previosly chosen.  there is no debate you must give up your gift and you cannot select your own gift.  In this game it pays to be last so you may chose from all the gifts unveiled and so choose the best gift, ideally.

The gift I chose to bring was a  Scottsdale Silver 1 oz. troy bar 99.9% pure silver.  I drew number 2 so I knew there was no way that I would get the best gift.  However, the gift I selected was an envelope with $25 of $1 scratch off lottery tickets.  There were many other gifts when all was said and done however, my gift was selected by the person drawing nuimber 5 and for the next 13 people no one traded for the pure silver.  On the other hand, everyone that came up traded for the lottery tickets from whomever held them.  Everyone there was 35 or less years of age single people, couples and married folk.  Yet none of them knew what the siolver was worth.  questions ranged from "what do I do with this" to "what is it".  It seemed that no one knew that silver weas even considered precious. 

When the gift giving was over I asked the guy to scratch off all of the lottery tickets to see how much "value" he had selected althought the silver with known value was passed by time and time again.  His lottery tickets amounted to one $5 prize and two free tickets out of $25 worth of tickets.  I got everyone's attention and asked them how much they thought this bar of silver was worth in comparison.  Not one person seemed to know.  I explained a rundown version of silver as a hedge and also as a commodity and told them the current spot price and how based of historic ratios the bare should be worth $115 U.S.  I also told them about the gold/silver ratio, about tuff economic times, and the wealth cycle of commodities vs, stocks and real estate.  All I can really say is there was only one person that seemed to get  the idea however, his wife chose the $13 bottle of wine in spite of him telling her to grab the silver.  Not to bad an investment if I do say so myself, since at the very least you know you will enjoy the wine some-what.

This opened my eyes dramatically, on Christmas day I decided to give 1 troy oz. of the same type of silver to my relatives, mom, dad, aunts, uncles, grandparents etcetera  They were blown away from the gift.  My uncle wanted to know all I knew about it as he was going to a seminar in the coming weeks about protecting assets in tuff economic times which would highlight commodities most likely.  Yet, these were also people who had been around or were raised by people who knew what real money was. 

To me, it's pretty interesting that time changes all things however experience lasts a lifetime.  It makes me wonder how people of my generation will end up.

Just thought I would share this story with you.  I hope you found it interesting please comment rate and follow my blog.  hopefully in the ensuing months I will be able to post more about PM's.

Until next time, take care and Merry Christmas

Donuvan