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by JumpCrisscross 643 days ago
> can be extremely hard to physically get to your savings money in a crisis

Having spare cash around is never a bad idea. But there are precious few timelines in which the banking system collapses so completely that savings are inaccessible for extended periods (or at all) but paper U.S. dollars continue to hold value.
1 comments
alexey-salmin 643 days ago
No one expects it to hold 100% of value, but even 10% of say $50k could be very helpful to live through the few months of the turmoil. Or to get to that foreign real estate which people recommend buying in comments on HN.
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JumpCrisscross 642 days ago
> even 10% of say $50k could be very helpful to live through the few months of the turmoil. Or to get to that foreign real estate

Genuinely curious for a single example of a collapsing country's fiat currency being useful for extradition.

If this is actually your fail case, hold foreign currency.

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alexey-salmin 642 days ago
Well it's one of the tail cases, so all things considered both local currency and foreign currencies are useful, each in it's own quality. So is a foreign currency in a foreign bank.
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JumpCrisscross 642 days ago
> it's one of the tail cases, so all things considered both local currency and foreign currencies are useful, each in it's own quality

Not really. If U.S. cash is useful, so are dollars in a bank. Not in the very short term. But over a timeline of more than a week.

Storing tens of thousands of dollars of cash for an emergency is stupid, because almost every emergency that takes out the banking system renders that currency worthless. You’re better off having hard supplies or forex you can trade for exfiltration.

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alexey-salmin 642 days ago
> If U.S. cash is useful, so are dollars in a bank.

This is a strong assumption. So far I've experienced three cases of loosing access to my money in the bank for various reasons and I also witnessed one more case with my parents 25 years ago. In all four cases the cash was still useful, losing between 0% and 70% of the value.

None of that was in US of course, but I still think that your range of scenarios is too narrow.

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