Gold. Is it any use?

[Me_Again]

(11 December 2013, 07:49)Midnitemo Wrote: Since interest rates fell to there lowest a while back I've been overpaying my mortgage by about £250 a month in an effort to get ahead of the game,been watching the gold market wondering if maybe I should be buying a soverign every month and squirreling it away instead, after all if theres a run on gold like there was a little while ago I could convert and pay off a lump sum.....still undecided....not much of a gambler really.

Martin Lewis of 'Martin's Money' did a bit on mortgages a while ago. He said something like there's no point in saving -other than to have a 'whatever happens' fund- when you have a mortgage. I think you are smart to overpay when you can. I recall writing a little computer program years ago that worked out how many years you knock off by over paying x, amount y amount and so on. I seem to recall that an overpayment of something like 10 or 15% knocked nearly a decade off a standard 25 year mortgage, and the higher the % the more rapidly, in an exponential line, it paid off.

I paid mine off about 12 years ago and what a day that was -directly as a result of listening to Lewis on the Jeremy Vine show or something - then I started saving the equivalent of the mortgage payments.

Now gold as an investment is a different thing to gold as a hedge against adversity so I don't know whether your plan is a good one. Theoretically it should work but the trick with stocks as well as metals, is buy low sell high, easy in theory -but without a crystal ball ............Like you I am not a gambler -given the forum we are on I suspect very few of us are gamblers since when we look ahead all we see is shit coming down the pipe not a blue sky and nice beach- so I'd probably overpay like you.
Thing is though, what use is owning the place ITSHTF? Not an easy question, I didn't have that problem because I already paid mine off before I had my reality check.

Funnily enough I don't rate coins, I'll tell you why. They are over priced against the weight of the gold in them by about 10%. I reckon that ITSHTF people will just weigh the gold and not give a toss if someone's head is on it. Nowadays the mini gold blocks come in a credit card sized blister pack with weight, serial number, purity and all that on the card so you have the 'bonafides' [which the coin provides by being minted as a coin].