Cute random picture of my sweet Luna
The need for more cash
In the past months I've thought quite often to make sure we have more cash at hand for when ATMs don't work or some banking issues, or worse: power issues occur. Yet I only had a small amount at home because most months the cash money would be spent during the month or not long after.
I planned on changing this and discussed another approach on saving up money with my boyfriend, who agreed that this was a smart move. At first, I had to look at last month's exact budget to see how much money we'd draw from the bank that month and I plan on doing so every month. As this was during the weekend, I planned to do this with some other tasks the following Monday.
Nationwide power outage
And then just several hours before we'd go to the ATM to take action, a nationwide power outage occured. Djeez, just our luck! I felt annoyed because I fully expected that afterwards, the ATM's would have a run for cash money and maybe we'd have limiations even for drawing money from the bank. When reading that many didn't have cash to pay for meals when the whole thing happened, I only suspected it to be worse because surely people wouldn't be trusting the digital currencies only anymore and would want some cash reserves now.
The next day
When the power went back on, we came into action right away and didn't waste time. As expected, water ran out in several supermarkets as well as gas bottles. We managed to buy them in another store and with that we knew we'd have plenty of water at least.
The ATM of our bank only had 1 customer while I noticed the other banks in the same street having long lines of people waiting (probably to take out money). I felt lucky when there was no limitation and I could take what I planned on taking out. I'm surely not going to trust all money on the bank anymore now, but gosh, why did this happen at the exact day of my plans for taking the money out, lol. Either way, it ended well.
Silver
Of course this made me think about other things as well, such as emergency supplies, more long storage food and well, silver. I'm sure I'm not the only person who felt that precious metals would be great to get right now compared to having fiat in the bank. Too bad the previous month was a lesser month in terms of income than those before but thanks to some smart budgetting and planning well, I managed to at least make sure that we have enough (more than enough) bottled water as well as cash at home for some emergencies.
Now I went back to check for silver and so far I haven't decided which purchase I go ahead with but I'm leaning towards collecting some popular but easy to sell (in case ever needed) coins such as maple leafs. I haven't had time to make the decision yet because of other things but I know what I need to do in the next weeks to come and will make sure to get some more silver.
Selling silver
I plan on selling a few of the silver coins I picked up early that I don't think suit the collection that well. I have a few randomly bought coins that I don't have any feeling with but picked up as I thought it was a good deal. Now that silver price is up a bit compared to them maybe I can make a small profit and buy some silver I like instead.
Picking up more emergency supplies
I also plan on picking up some more emergency supplies that could help in any future emergencies. For example, our region still experiences brown water in some parts. Luckily this is not happening in our building, but the faucet definitely stopped working after the outage because of lots of contamination in the filters. I've seen a dozen pictures and videos of people in our area with water that's brown and normally used for cooking and even drinking. Meanwhile the prices of the water and tax went up a lot but yet we don't have clean water, sigh.
I know I will stick to the bottled water and even cook with that from now on.
Did you change anything?
If you live in Spain (or any of the other countries affected by the outage) did you change anything after the outage? Such as loading up on cash, food, emergency supplies etc? And if so, which ones are you prioritizing?
Let me know in the comments below :)