What I Would Tell My Son…

My son’s birthday arrived recently and I asked him what he might want for his 29th.

“I don’t know,” came the reply. “Nothing, really.”

An hour later, came the revision.

“For my birthday, I want a personalized letter to me that I can’t open for 10 years.”

That, dear reader, is a fantastic birthday present request, easily the best I’ve ever heard.

I can give my son something that he will hold onto for the rest of his life, and hopefully turn to time and again to laugh, to cry, to learn… and to remember the dad who raised him.

I can’t tell you how many times in life I think about my grandparents, who raised me, and wishing they’d left behind a record of their lives—the years I was not a part of. What they lived through in the Depression, World War II, the rise of the middle class. How they met and why they made the decisions they made, and what they learned from that.

All with the aim of teaching me the lessons they learned based on the various obstacles and hurdles they faced in life so that I might find a parallel message and a route through similar obstacles and hurdles I’ve had to confront in the years since they departed.

Regardless of era, life is not so different from one generation to the next.

Sure, technology changes. TV shows come and go. Medicine progresses. But at our core, we are no different than our forebears in too many ways to count. We have the same issues and opportunities with jobs and love and family and children and investing and thinking about and preparing for the future.

And so it is that I truly took to my son’s request. So much so that I have decided now to write him a personalized letter for each of his birthdays going forward, until I can no longer write.

If nothing else, I want him to know his dad beyond the person who raised him.

Which brings me ’round to a question I answered to wrap up the Future of Wealth event in Dublin, Ireland, last week. The question: Jeff, if your son were here right now, what would you tell him to prepare him for tomorrow?

I knew the question was coming; my managing editor, Ben Murnane, warned me days in advance he’d be asking me the question as a way to sum up all that I had shared with the 140ish attendees. So I’d been thinking about it for a couple of days.

Here’s what I told them… and by the way, this is paraphrased from my recollections. We didn’t record the event, and I didn’t write anything down because I wanted my response to be as fresh and off-the-cuff as possible.

1. Buy Gold

To Millennials, Gen Z, and the younger Gen Alphas, gold is an archaic, boomer asset ambling along with a walker in a world of lightning-fast digital currency.

Sure, gold has surged past $4,100 per ounce—a 4x move in 20 years—to set an extraordinary all-time high. But bitcoin has surged from literally nothing to $125,000 in just 15 years.

And honestly, my son is the one who pushed me into crypto back in 2017, so I certainly cannot tell him to “buy bitcoin and hold it!” because that’s like telling a duck to paddle in the water.

But gold is a different story.

He doesn’t own gold and doesn’t know why he should in a cryptocurrency world.

He (and you) should own it because:

1. Gold has thousands of years of recorded history repairing the economic and monetary hubris of man, and it will do so again because…

2. Boomers and Xers are the ones still running central banks globally, and while they’re increasingly open to the thought of bitcoin, they feel far more comfortable and in their own element owning gold.

The world economy is racing toward a monetary reset. There’s simply too much debt, particularly Western debt, and it’s retarding global growth and helping create vast economic disparity, among a litany of impacts.

Gold is one of the antidotes to the impending crisis.

As I told the attendees in Dublin, “Gold prices will go down… at some point. But that point won’t come before gold touches $10,000 per ounce.”

So I continue to counsel my son to “be a boomer and buy gold.”

2. Think About Wealth Preservation

My son has done well for himself, and I am exceedingly proud of him, as I regularly tell him.

Now, however, I want him to focus more intently on preserving his wealth so that his life is easier, richer, and more fulfilling than mine.

That message is not always well received in a 29-year-old noggin.

Though he’s past that infuriating age where he thinks he knows better than me or his mom, he’s still too young to really grasp the ways the world—and the world of investing—can change in a blink.

As I say in Field Notes, and as I noted more than once at the Dublin event:

The status quo is never static. It is forever changing.

Just because every day you live looks a lot like every day you’ve already lived does not mean tomorrow can’t come along and radically change it in ways you never expected.

September 10, 2001, was a whole lot like September 9, 2001… and every other September day I have ever known in my 59 years taking up space on this rocky marble.

But then along comes September 11 to set America on an entirely different and unexpected path. A path that arguably has helped lead us to this point where the US is now an overly paranoid police state waging expensive and unwinnable wars against terrorism, which have contributed mightily to America’s mountain of insurmountable debts.

You have to connect dots to see what’s possible.

Sure, “possible” might never come to pass.

Then again, it very well could.

And if you have not prepared your life for a knowable possibility, then what’s possible will probably upend your finances in hurtful ways.

“So,” I’ve told my son, “always look to preserve some of your wealth.”

By all means, take some risks. Own some assets that are moonshot opportunities. Go street-rat crazy with crypto projects that could turn every $100 into $10,000 or more. Invest in some start-up tech company that might change the world.

But build a safety barrier into your life with assets designed to protect against the gray swans we can predict: the USD reaching historic lows, maybe even losing reserve currency status; inflation racing much higher; the geographic borders and the political system of America changing.

3. Have a Plan B… Outside the US

The vast majority of Americans will never move overseas. The vast majority do not consider that even as a remote possibility.

I get that. All good. No worries.

But… at the very least, keep the idea in your mind. Know that it is an option, should the worst come to pass.

Because I live in Europe, Americans ask me all the time about Russia saber-rattling on the eastern fringes of the continent. Honestly, I am not terribly worried about it.

But I still have a Plan B in place—an escape hatch for me and my family in the event that tomorrow looks very different than all my yesterdays. (I’m decamping to Uruguay.)

America, sad to say, is devolving and it has devolved.

No one of my generation (Gen X and the boomers above me) can legitimately say that America today is better than America circa pre-2000s. America today is demonstrably inferior to the America we grew up in.

That kind of devolution takes years to unfold, meaning that reversal takes even longer. In some ways, it’s a mathematical analogy: Losing 50% of your investment means you have to regain 100% of what remains just to reach breakeven.

Same with life in modern America, I tell my son.

“What your generation has lost that my generation once had is not something that will return again easily. It’s going to take a crisis to fix America’s systemic problems. And sticking around for the crisis might not be the best idea. At the very least, just know that you have options overseas to live a safer, more affordable life.”

And that’s it. Those are the three messages I shared with attendees in Dublin, and they are the very real conversations I have with my son.

I know he doesn’t really listen to me. But I have shared the wisdom of my 59 years.

And one day, those messages will resonate, and he will be prepared to act.