Hacking Silver 101: Complete Guide to Investing in Silver

silver has doubled in price this is not a drill [Music] hello everybody silver picker here and welcome to the silver picker squad now unless you've been living under a rock you have absolutely noticed the meteoric rise in silver prices in the last few months i mean just a few months ago you could have bought silver at 12 13 14 bucks an ounce and today it has risen to 28 29 and even 30 an ounce which is absolutely bananas now if you're kicking yourself for not having gotten in at the ground floor several months ago well i'm here to tell you do not despair because there are still tons of amazing opportunities in investing in physical silver today and whether you're a newbie that's never touched a silver coin before or a beginner that has sort of dipped their toes into silver or even somebody that's more advanced than that this video is for you because i'm going to be teaching you the knowledge skills and tools that you need to start investing in physical silver confidently intelligently and of course successfully we're going to be going into the who what when where why and how of silver and at the end of this video if you stay tuned for that i am going to be giving you a list of my sleeper picks for some of the most undervalued silver on the market that you can buy today and potentially make a mint on going forward so enough with the jibber jabber let's get started and see who should be investing in silver the who is easy right the who is you it's you it's me and it's anybody that wants to have a more secure and robust financial future right everybody knows to invest in stocks everybody knows to invest in bonds you got a 401k and the dream of course is to buy your own property but a lot of people seem to forget precious metals like gold and silver in their portfolio maybe it seems antiquated maybe it's confusing but in this video i want to give you some thoughts on why i think it should be part of your portfolio if not even a bigger part than you might have expected now i will give the disclaimer this is not financial advice these are my opinions so take them with what you will and enjoy the rest of the video because we are now moving on to the most important one which is why should you invest in silver [Music] so there's lots of reasons why you might want to invest in silver but i'm going to give you the three most compelling ones and the first one which is arguably the most important one is that it is an incredible hedge against inflation now you may have read that before and not really understood what it meant so i'm gonna try and explain it maybe oversimplify it a bit but you're definitely gonna get a sense of what that means and first off inflation inflation is generally characterized by the loss of purchasing power within a currency so if you want to buy an item you're going to need more and more and more of that same currency to buy the same item so let's use an example that'll really highlight why silver is such a good hedge against inflation in 1940 a hershey bar cost five cents so with just this little dime from the 1940s era i could have bought two full hershey bars today a hershey bar costs a dollar fifty so to get two of them i'd have to pay three dollars or instead of one dime 30 dimes now here's where it gets interesting so back then i could pay this dime and get two hershey bars however because dimes back then were composed of 90 silver the silver contained within this actual coin right in my hands right now is worth over two dollars which means that the purchasing power of this dime has done a really really good job at retaining its value because i could still today sell this dime and with the money buy a hershey bar and even get 50 cents change back well while it still won't buy me two full hershey bars it has done a heck of a lot better job at retaining its value through the course of inflation than the us dollar right one silver dime versus 30 modern u.s dimes that do not have any precious metals in them so that is the power of silver in terms of hedging against inflation the value of the actual silver that you have today will retain its purchasing power much much better into the future than fiat currencies like the dollar another reason why you might want to invest in silver is that you can beat the system that's right you can buy silver for below its value i mean you couldn't do that with stocks right imagine trying to buy apple stock at a 15 or 20 discount i don't even think there's a mechanism that would allow you to do that but with silver you can go to an independent buyer and negotiate with them and they may sell you their silver for under spot i can't tell you how many times countless times honestly that i've bought silver for 20 30 under spot and then resold it for 10 above spot and everybody gets a good deal there right the seller gets to sell all their silver in one fell swoop and maybe they're even making a profit on it you get a great deal and the person you're selling it to is only paying 10 or so percent over spot and i'm making a 30 profit so you can't do that with most investments you definitely can't do that in the stock market so being able to beat the system and find deals even when the price of silver is high is definitely a good reason to buy silver and the third reason is that it's fun it's not just a way of investing but it's also a hobby i mean having a bunch of these cool silver coins to collect and to learn history and to learn geography and about economics is a huge benefit i mean also it's not so fun necessarily investing in stocks you can't sit there and examine your stock portfolio like you can an old silver coin and that is a real benefit because the more you're interested in something the more time you're going to be willing to invest in learning about it and you'll become a smarter and more sophisticated investor just by the fact that you enjoy it so don't discount the fact that it's also a hobby that's fun to collect and to grow with aside from just the purely financial reasons for investing in silver so if you're still watching you're probably intrigued by silver and you've been convinced that you should probably buy some silver but you don't know what to buy and it can be very overwhelming to a new investor about what to buy because there are so many different options out there so i'm going to be giving you the seven different categories of silver items that you could buy and i'm going to start with the ones that i think are best for beginners all the way down to the ones that i think beginners should avoid and maybe honestly every investor should avoid [Music] the first thing that i think every silver investor should start with is u.s junk silver coins now don't let the word junk silver throw you off junk silver just means that these coins don't have any numismatic value or coin collector value for you nerds but really what i like about these coins is that they are recognizable right every single one of them is very recognizable they're minted by a government so the weights and purities are definitely trustworthy and even with all of that they still have very very low premiums meaning you're just basically going to be paying the actual silver value or maybe a little bit more maybe 10 or tops 20 percent more but you can get these for spot and sometimes even below spot price which makes them a fantastic place to start and the reason why you want them to be trustworthy and recognizable is that it makes it so much easier to sell when you're ready to sell there's nothing worse than buying silver at a great price and then silver going up and then you're not able to sell the actual silver items because people are suspicious of them a close second are u.s silver dollars like morgan dollars and peace dollars the reason why they're not quite as good as the haves quarters and dimes is because they do come with a premium so especially morgan silver dollars but i really like them because they're big and chunky they're almost an ounce of silver and you can usually get them for a lot less of a premium than you could other silver bullion items plus they're really cool and do sometimes have some numismatic value as well now the third thing are one ounce government issue silver bullion coins now you may not know this but every single government or i should say many governments issue silver bullion coins specifically for investors the us issues american silver eagles every single year the canadian government has silver maple leaves great britain has britannias mexico has libertads and the list goes on those are amazing because again they're from trustworthy governments so you know that the purity and the size are accurate they are really really beautiful to collect which is just an added bonus and they're very easy to sell later on because they're so popular because of this trustworthy element now the only downside is that they usually have very hefty premiums so you may be paying 10 20 30 or even more 40 above spot price for an american silver eagle however the reason why i still think they're great is because even when you sell them they really do retain their value and you can get that premium back so i definitely think that getting some of these really big well-known government-issued bullion coins is definitely a good place to start too next are junk silver coins from foreign countries so similar to u.s coins they're coins that have no numismatic value but have the silver value and these can be a great opportunity in fact some of them are going to appear on my sleeper list at the end of the video so definitely stay tuned for that but the great thing about foreign junk silver is that at pretty much any local coin store you can go through their box of junk silver and find foreign silver coins that they will sell you at spot which is amazing so you can buy these with no premium the downside of course is that because all these different countries and all these different eras have different weights different purities and all sorts of different transitions even within the same coin right so one coin made in let's say 1919 might be sterling silver but in 1920 it was reduced to 50 silver so all of these different things make a lot of buyers suspicious and uncomfortable with it which definitely makes it harder to sell going forward especially if you have a big collection with lots of different weights and purities it's going to be very hard to actually sell it all at once and get your money back but otherwise if you're willing to have the patience to go through it and to catalog everything it could be a really really good opportunity now next is really interesting it is just simply silver items so non-coins non-bullion items but just silver items that you might know from your everyday life like jewelry or silverware or goblets candelabras platters all sorts of stuff like that that's made of silver often sterling silver which is 92 and a half percent pure which is even more than u.s junk silver but for whatever reason they are not that popular and part of the reason is because they're from lots of different companies so you don't really know if you can trust them also there's a lot of fakes out there and they have different weights and they're kind of unwieldy but i still think that they have a really really good opportunity especially for new collectors and new investors because you can also learn a lot about the process for verifying and testing authenticity and it will really get your feet wet real quick into the world of silver now the next thing i'm going to come out and say it this is going to be a little controversial the next thing is bars silver bars and i'm gonna say i don't think they're a good investment i don't think they're a good investment for most people especially beginners and the reason is because a bars are much much more easily faked than coins right especially if you're getting bigger and bigger bars 10 20 50 or 100 ounce bars those could be silver plated on the outside but be stuffed with tungsten a worthless metal so you definitely definitely want to be careful with those also they seem to have insanely high premiums in a lot of cases a lot of the bars have crazy premiums and you'd be better off buying single ounces that you could do a lot better with when you come to resell them selling a 100 ounce bar or a kilo bar is not always the easiest thing so i think if you're gonna get into bars make sure that you have a lot of knowledge if you're gonna get into like hand poured and vintage bars there's nothing wrong with that but it's more like coin collecting in my opinion than bullion investing and i think that as a beginner there are so many so many other things that you could be spending your money on in the world of silver that i think you should just leave out bars entirely but hey if you disagree let me know in the comments below why and last on my list are generic silver rounds now if you're new you may confuse these with coins because they're the same shape as a coin but don't be fooled the reason why they're called generic rounds is because they're produced by private companies not governments and that's what makes them kind of untrustworthy and you're not even sure the weight you're not even sure of the purity so you might want to avoid those and while they have really cool designs and they can be fun to collect they're really hard to verify and a lot of people don't trust them that makes them even harder to sell they do have lower premiums so if you know what you're doing you could get some good deals on them and certainly i have some generic silver rounds in my stack but in general i would say avoid them go for the government issued stuff go for the junk silver you won't go wrong with those and you really can you know make some mistakes with these silver rounds because there are a lot of fakes where you buy from is almost as important as what you buy because if you can find a trustworthy source you can get rid of a lot of headaches and potentially save yourself a lot of financial distress in the future but before i get to tell you where i think you should be buying your silver from if you don't mind please take a moment to like this video and even share it with your friends and if you're not subscribed most of you watching unfortunately are not subscribed but there's so much awesome information on this channel a lot of fun stuff and if you join me for the ride i would love it if you'd hit that big old red subscribe button i put a lot of work into this particular video i want to teach people and spread the word about gold and silver investing and you guys can help me do that by simply just hitting the like button sharing it with your friends on social media and hitting the subscribe button i would definitely really really appreciate it so now that you've done that let's get into where you should be buying silver the number one place where i think you should be buying your silver from is from private sellers now this does mean that you need to know what you're doing you need to know how to verify whether something is real or fake because you could lose your shirt if you don't know what you're doing but assuming you've done the research and you know what is a real silver coin or what is a real silver piece of bullion or a silver spoon you know how to test it i just did a video last week on how to test silver so you can check that out in the card right here but once you know what you're doing buying from private sellers is amazing because there are lots of non-financial factors that go into their reason for selling right they might be just busy and they don't want to have to deal with selling things individually they'd rather sell everything at a discount and get rid of it all at once now imagine a guy that inherits 100 ounces of silver from his grandfather he doesn't care about it he doesn't know about it he just wants a fair deal and he wants to get rid of it all at once you can go to him and say look this is what it's worth i'm willing to buy it at a 85 percent of the value so giving me a 15 discount what do you say and it's up to them whether to take it or leave it and they usually will say yes so you'll buy it at a 15 discount and then you can either keep it in your stack for long term or resell it and you could sell it at 10 or 20 over spot and end up making like 20 or 30 profit which is absolutely fantastic that's something that you can't usually do when you're buying at more established from more established sellers so i love buying at garage sales estate sales off craigslist facebook marketplace i mean i have basically built my entire business and my entire precious metals stack from buying from these sources and it has done me really really well the next best place which is probably the best place to start for beginners is your local coin shop your local coin shop is a place where you can have a relationship with the owner there in almost every case they're super nice they're super helpful and they love getting new people into silver and coin collecting and they will absolutely help you and they're usually long-term thinking people so they're not going to have you come in and rip you off the first time so that you never come back they're going to want to give you good deals they're going to want to give you fair deals so that you keep coming back and coming back and become a long-term customer and having a good local coin shop is truly a gift and those of you out there who have had them in the past but now live in an area where you don't have them you know exactly what i'm talking about so support your local coin shop rub their back and they'll rub yours it is absolutely i think the best place to start for a true beginner that doesn't really know anything about coin collecting or precious metals investing now i am well aware that a lot of you watching right now don't have access to a local coin store maybe you don't live near one or maybe just because what's going on in the world right now either it's closed or you don't feel comfortable going out into public into one of these local coin stores and i totally respect and understand that but thankfully in the year 2020 with all the technology we have there are plenty of amazing online bullion dealers that you can access right from your home and there are a ton of them that are really respectable and upstanding but of course my favorite is sd bullion sd bullion is amazing because frankly they almost always have the lowest prices on the best silver they have a huge selection and what's important to me is that the leadership is extremely ethical and they absolutely put people over profit and i can tell you that for sure because i've interviewed them and they have literally tens of thousands of positive five star reviews all over the internet you can look it up yourself and if you want to see what my picks and my recommendations for silver on their website are you can go to sdbullion.com silverpicker and see what my recommendations are so check it out links below sdbullion.com silverpicker they are a fantastic fantastic option but of course if there are other dealers out there that you want to use you can find them and use them as well there are certainly lots of other places you can buy silver but the last one on my list is ebay and ebay is totally a double-edged sword there are amazing amazing opportunities to be had on ebay i mean literally last week a buddy of mine who's in the business told me that he bought a watch that was selling for 150 bucks because he knew that that particular watch had two versions one gold and one not gold and he could tell that that one was the gold one no one else could he bought it 18 karat gold and he made almost 2 000 on that deal absolutely incredible there are tons and tons of deals to be had in precious metals on ebay if you know what you're looking for however the downside is that there are tons and tons and tons of scams and fake coins being sold on ebay and if you don't know what you're doing you might end up getting ripped off and worse because there are some really good fakes you may not find out that you bought a fake until years later when it's too late so definitely take ebay with a grain of salt there are some opportunities to be had out there but there are of course risks and like i said before in terms of the fakes there's a lot of fakes coming out of china so please avoid websites like wish.com aliexpress and basically any place online where they're selling silver at a significant discount below spot be suspicious pass on it and buy it from a reputable dealer all right so you're ready to buy right you're about to click that order button but then you think yourself wait a minute but is this actually a good deal is this a good value for the silver i'm buying well now i'm going to tell you how much you should be paying and the simplest way to calculate the value of silver is just to first understand what the value of the silver itself is and the way you do that is you find out what the spot price is which is generally the price per troy ounce of silver so today it's dollars and 50 cents per troy ounce of silver then you multiply that by the number of ounces you have so let's say you have one ounce right that's 28 dollars and 50 cents times one and then you need to pre and then you need to multiply it by the purity in percentages so let's say you have an item that's one ounce but it's only fifty percent silver then you're going to have to multiply that 28 dollars and 50 cents by one by 0.5 but if it's 100 silver or typically described as 0.999 pure then you're going to multiply that by 99.9 percent and that's the basic way that you get the value of the silver however as we discussed earlier most silver bullion pieces because it's not just raw silver right of the ground somebody had to put money and time into turning it into a coin or a bar or a piece of jewelry there is a premium above the spot price of the silver and premiums can vary wildly right in my opinion silver bullion when you buy scrap silver you should be paying no more than spots so if you're buying like sterling silver spoons or a broken piece of jewelry you should be paying no more than spot on junk u.s silver coins i generally don't like to pay more than 10 and on government issued coins i don't like to pay more than 20 however i will give a disclaimer that prices and premiums have been going absolutely insane since corona hit right there have been times where things have had 50 or 100 percent premiums where in the past they only had 20 premiums so what i'll say for normal times you can go by those percentages that i recommended but for today what i really recommend is you take a look at the market see what's out there see what makes sense to you and then think about it logically is this something that i can buy now and reasonably be able to get that back in the future so do some research get some more knowledge and then you will have all the tools you need to what to know whether something is a good deal or not now before we get into my sleeper list of the best silver to buy the most undervalued silver to buy we're going to talk about when to buy [Music] it's not as simple as it sounds i mean the adage says buy low sell high of course but it's easier said than done i mean you can try and time the market and buy silver when it's really low and then wait six months a year two years ten years down the line to resell but if you're going to become a real serious silver stacker or silver investor you're going to want to cost average or buys so that means buying at regular intervals and averaging your cost out over time i mean think about it like this let's say you have five thousand dollars you want to invest in silver and the silver price is 28 if tomorrow you buy all the silver right now at 28 then you've bought all the silver and you've used up all of your money now let's say the next day silver drops to 25 an ounce now you're down three dollars an ounce and you've got no more money to buy anything else so all you can do is sit and wait and hope that silver goes up or sell it and cut your losses neither of which are great options however let's say you've got that five thousand dollars and you decide to cost average your purchases so today you buy at twenty eight dollars a thousand dollars worth tomorrow it drops down to let's say 25 like we said you buy another thousand dollars worth now because you bought a thousand at 28 and a thousand at twenty five your cost average is actually twenty six dollars and fifty cents so now you're only down a buck fifty instead of three dollars and if you keep doing that yes your upside may be a little bit lower but you will dramatically dramatically lower your risk and your loss potential which is probably the smarter way to invest long term so take it or leave it you can decide to try and time the market and go for the big gambles but my opinion you should try and cost average buy let's say silver every week or every month put a little bit put the same amount in every time and you will end up with a nice silver stack at an average cost that is reasonable now i also have a little bit of a controversial opinion on when to buy silver and that's for you specifically watching right now you should buy silver right now i mean like today like right after you finish watching this video go on sdbullion.com silverpicker see what the deals that i'm recommending are and buy something and that's by the way not just like a shameless plug for myself i'm genuinely saying that because a lot of people who are new to this get stuck with analysis paralysis and what that means is they'll read articles and watch videos and all that will happen is they'll get overwhelmed and they'll say i don't know what's a good deal i don't know what to buy and they'll basically just shut down and honestly that's what happened to me in the early years of bitcoin i found out about bitcoin back in 2011. i really was pretty early on that but i started doing research and reading and not understanding and i i basically ended up just saying it's too much and i gave up on it had i just put a hundred dollars into it i would have made a fortune and that's kind of what i'm telling you today i'm not saying that silver is gonna explode like bitcoin did but i'm saying i'm not telling you to mortgage your house or put ten thousand dollars into silver right now but right now buy a few ounces put a hundred two hundred 200 into silver it's not going to break the bank it's not going to ruin your life if you lose that or if you decide that you're not interested but what it will do is make you have skin in the game and that's really important because once you have skin in the game you're going to be paying attention a lot more to what's going on in the market what are the factors that will raise or lower silver prices and once you have the physical silver in your possession you can examine it you can see what real silver looks like you can see how it feels how it sounds how it looks how it even smells and then you'll be able to know when you see other silver items that are similar whether they're real or fake it'll definitely definitely help you and once you have them in your possession you may say you know what this isn't for me this is not what i'm interested in and then you can either resell it or put them in a shoe box save them for a rainy day but you'll have learned and you'll have been able to make a real educated decision on whether it's something that you want to invest in long term or whether this was a nice trial but you're done with it and that's why i think you should start today instead of pushing it off and pushing it off and pushing it off so that was the who what when where why and how of silver bullion investing definitely cool but as promised i also have a list of specific silver bullion items that i think are total sleepers that i think are undervalued in the market and if you buy them today you may make a mint down the line and you'll be coming back to this video and thanking me in the comments below i'm sure and on that note if i missed anything in the who what when where why and how of silver put it down in the comments below we would definitely love to learn from you [Music] number one on my sleeper list are 40 silver us coins now you probably know about the 40 u.s kennedy half dollars i've talked about those in previous videos those are a great deal but there's also 40 eisenhower dollars out there as well and both of those types of coins can often be bought for below spot even from dealers i have countless times been at coin shows or coin dealers who have offered me tons and tons of 40 silver coins at or even a few percent below spot i can guarantee you that that will not be the case forever people are going to become wise to that because they're still big chunky silver coins and if you can buy them at a good deal now i am confident beyond positive that those will be selling at a premium down the line as i alluded to earlier sterling silver items are an incredible opportunity to buy silver at really low prices i mean think about it everyone and their grandmother has a sterling silver set of cutlery or a platter or a tea pourer or something like that and you can often get them at garage sales or flea markets at really amazing prices and if you keep your eye out and you buy a little bit here and there you could end up with a really serious silver stack just in cutlery and goblets and stuff like that you definitely don't want to miss out now the next sleeper are 50 silver coins from great britain now in 1919 and earlier silver coins from great britain were sterling silver or 92 and a half percent silver but between 1920 and 1947 all the coins from great britain were minted in 50 silver which is a pretty low silver value however it's still silver some of the coins are really chunky and you can go to basically any local coin store or a coin show dig through their junk silver foreign bin and get them at spot i mean again that will not last forever i can guarantee you that so buy those when you have the opportunity because they are still really really good silver coins and they're also pretty interesting now if 40 and 50 silver are not your bag well there are some sleepers that are much much higher purity you can actually get 90 silver coins so same as the us by buying coins from panama that's right balboa's from panama actually track the same specs as us coins from that era and you can get 90 silver coins at usually lower prices than you could us junk silver so again look through those bargain bins look through those junk silver boxes and you can get the exact same coins the exact same value the exact same purity the exact same weight coins from panama as in the u.s and you can get them at a much much cheaper price and i definitely think that that won't last forever either so if you see panamanian balboas at a really good price at or below spot definitely pick them up and last but not least the sleeper of all sleepers what i basically founded my entire channel on is buying broken sterling silver jewelry there are so many pieces of broken sterling silver jewelry out there at at pennies on the dollar i mean you go to a garage sale and you see a mismatched silver earring the person who's selling it they don't think about it in terms of silver they think about it as the fact that it's missing one of the earrings and they'll probably sell it for 25 cents it might have three or four dollars worth of silver in it same thing for bracelets and necklaces you can buy so much broken or damaged or old sterling silver jewelry for pennies on the dollar and if you don't want to have that in your stack fine buy it resell it at spot and then take that money and buy silver coins or silver bullion with it and it's basically just trading up and buying silver bullion at a huge huge discount so definitely keep your eyes out for that you won't go wrong wow that was a lot of information so i'm gonna tell you start the video over and watch it again and then watch it again and then watch it again because if you're a beginner i'm sure a lot of this information was really thrown at you and difficult to sort of absorb but the more you watch this and the more you get into silver the more you're going to understand about how to invest in it wisely and you're going to become better and better and more sophisticated and hopefully really really successful with it now if you think i missed something whether on the list of who what when where why and how or on my sleeper list please put it down in the comments below we would all love to learn from you and love to hear about it if you like this video if you learned from it and if you want to support my mission in informing educating and entertaining people all about coin collecting precious metals investing in personal finance please throw me a like please share the video hit that big ol red subscribe button really like right now hit that red subscribe button it won't hurt it won't bite and if you want to support my channel in a more tangible way please consider participating in my patreon campaign the links are below i've got a lot more awesome videos about coin collecting precious metal stacking coming down the pike so stay tuned and until then silver picker out a huge huge thank you to all of my wonderful patrons you guys probably noticed that the sound quality of my videos has improved dramatically and that's because i bought a brand new microphone all thanks to my patreon supporters you guys rock and thanks for letting us all protect our ears [Music] you

Channel: Silverpicker

Views: 8,123

Rating: 4.9352517 out of 5

Keywords: Silver, gold, coins, coinage, numismatics, numismatist, collector, silver stacker, stacker, silver bug, ASE, Eagle, cent, penny, dime, quarter, nickel, half, halves, scrap, 14k, 18k, 24k, 999, sterling, crh, coin roll hunting, Morgan dollar, peace dollar, bullion, silver bullion, coin collecting, coin collection, picking, thrifting

Id: _inVzg1xHJE

Length: 32min 21sec (1941 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 20 2020