Accepting Gold and Silver As A Form of Payment At Your Business
In a recent letter to the Parker farmers market, I introduced the idea of encouraging and incentivizing businesses to accept Gold and Silver as a form of payment for goods and services. This post is meant to be a kind of FAQ and strategy document to determine what is needed to get this idea off the ground.
1. Why accept Gold and Silver as a form of payment?
1A: Gold and Silver Cut Out Free Loading Banks:
There are two reasons for this, one is moral and the other is practical. Morally, dollars are created from nothing which means those who create dollars and their politically connected friends are able to benefit from the productivity of society without offering anything in return. Accepting dollars is the equivalent of being stolen from by means of deception, otherwise known as fraud.
1B: Gold and Silver Protect The Value of Your Savings:
The more practical reason has to do with inflation. When you accept dollars in an inflationary environment, you are accepting a depreciating asset as money. Every day you hold dollars, you are losing purchasing power. If you are a business that works for profits, this means that you intend to save your money for some period of time in order to purchase something in the future. Why would you save in a currency that is losing value when you could be saving in an asset that gains value? Practically, so long as you can sell gold and silver for the dominant currency of the day, saving in gold and silver is far superior to saving in dollars.
1C: Gold and Silver Make Your a More Competitive Businesses
In our current inflationary environment, businesses feel compelled to raise their prices to stay profitable. A business that is accepting an asset that increases in value overtime is able to keep prices lower in the present knowing that Gold and Silver will not be devalued into the future. Since customers prefer lower prices, accepting gold and silver is a competitive advantage for business because these forms of payments relieve businesses of the pressure to raise their prices as much as businesses who accept only inflationary currencies.
In addition, perhaps your employees would prefer to take a portion of their pay in gold and silver at a discount compared to fiat currency. Since the Federal Reserve Act and the Income Tax Act were passed hand in hand, dealing in gold and silver allows you and your employees to avoid paying taxes*.
One could argue that all taxes are immoral and a form of illegitimate theft. Since the system of dollar creation benefits from the arbitrary demand created by the dollar through income taxes, banks and governments are incentivized to keep your revenues and expenses in the banking industry. If you and your employees can keep transactions outside of the banking industry, by exchanging physical gold and silver, you can protect yourself from their illegitimate taxation and inflation tactics.
2. How should businesses price their products and services in gold and silver?
There is a calculator here based on the exchange rate of a gold product called Gold Backs which are fractionalized amounts of gold laced into large bill like shapes. You can use this calculator for converting Gold backs to your current prices
https://www.goldback.com/calculator
If a customer brings physical gold, you can simply create a conversion spreadsheet that creates a ratio between your cost and the spot price of the metal plus any discount or premium you want to add to the price. If you apply a discount, you are wanting the customer to cover the cost of shipping. If you apply a premium, you are incentivizing customers to pay you in money instead of currency, saving you the hassle of acquiring the metal yourself. A good rule of thumb is that a discount a premium should be roughly 3.5% give or take. If the spot price is $31 and you were applying a discount, you would set the value of silver at $29.91. If the you were applying a premium, you would set the value of silver at $32.09. Once you have your spreadsheet of your prices and your adjustment percentage, you would simply need to plug in the daily spot price to get the converted prices. You can find the spot price here:
https://www.moneymetals.com/precious-metals-charts
3. How do I convert metals into dollars?
Most online metals dealers have buy back programs. I have used the buyback program of APMEX several times and have been pleased with their work. You can also sell you metals at local coin shops.
4. Why don’t I just accept dollars and then buy gold and silver with those dollars?
4A. Only accepting dollars is what the money creating banks want.
Requiring dollars inadvertently requires your customers to earn dollars, which means they must provide their productivity to the system run by those who make dollars without effort or energy. If you are open to doing business in a form of money that requires people to provide something of value to the economy, you are doing you part in preventing thieves from free loading off your customers. We all live in this world together and what negatively or positively affects one of us affects all of us.
4B. You are in the business of making money and building wealth, not timing markets and dealing with coin dealers.
In the current inflationary environment, the value of the dollar can fall by 30% in a few short months. Remember, inflation is a way the banks and the government and their politically connected friends steal from you by stealing your purchasing power. Why put your wealth at risk of theft when you can simply accept gold and silver from your customers upfront?
5. How do I know the metals aren’t fake or fraudulent?
First of all, if you follow this question to its logical end, you’ll realize that the dollars we all trade are all fake. Dollars are like securities on money. In the same way that a car is a car but a car title is a security that represents the car, dollars are securities that represent gold and silver. The fact that banks colluded with governments to counterfeit more money claims than gold and silver on hand is an example of pure fraud deserving massive public outrage and retribution.
The answer to this question is simple but requires you to require the same honesty and competency from your customer as they require from you. A customer might ask you, “How do I know your beef is grass fed?” How would you answer that question? When it comes to money like gold and silver, there are tools you can use to verify veracity such as The Fisch.
At first you can choose to only accept certain well known coins like American Eagles. Keeping coins that you know are legitimate and using those to compare to possible fakes is also a good method.
Undoubtedly once enough businesses accept gold and silver, businesses will pop up in support of verifying coins with more sophisticated methods, taking pressure off the market to verify and onto that specialized business.
What questions do you have? Send them to me at Zachtravismoore@gmail.com
I am looking for businesses that are interested in accepting gold and silver at businesses around the Denver Metro Area. Perhaps we can start a group that meets to discuss strategies for ensuring a prosperous and just economy for our community.
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