Gold & Silver Barter: All You Need to Know

Physical silver and gold isn’t just for preserving your savings. It’s also the world’s oldest form of money.

You can bypass the Federal Reserve’s worthless paper dollars by spending precious metals with friends, neighbors, and businesses which accept sound money. We’ve created a brand new Barter Metals page with all of the information you need to get started conducting business using physical gold and silver – and links to our most popular barterable products.

Barter may seem outdated, but as Peter Schiff points out, it has a long history in the US:

Historically, paying for items in silver or gold was actually quite common. We happen to live in an unusual time and place where generations have grown up trading exclusively in paper. While my parents still used dimes made of silver, we have now gone several decades with no precious metals in any of our official coinage. But this system of money by government fiat is unsustainable.”

Greeks can tell you first-hand about the importance of a barter economy in times of economic chaos. Since the virtual collapse of the Greek financial system earlier this year, a robust barter economy has developed out of sheer necessity, as everyday Greeks try to find ways to cope with cash withdrawal limits and currency shortages.

Imagine being a Greek today with a pocketful of silver or gold coins. It would be a lot easier to go to the market and barter for your daily needs, rather than carrying around odds and ends in the hopes you have something the grocer wants in trade.

You have the opportunity to get ahead of the game and establish barter relationships in your own community now, before it becomes imperative due to a banking or currency crisis. Our new Barter Metals page tells you how to get started, and how to find people willing to trade goods and services for gold or silver.

Of course, you can’t exactly lug gold bars to your local mechanic or farmer’s market. And the US Mint removed all of the silver from its coinage decades ago. So, how exactly do you conduct business in gold and silver? We answer that question and highlight a number of readily available options that will allow you to utilize precious metals for everyday, person-to-person transactions.

For example, the Valcambi CombiBar provides a unique way to barter using small amounts of gold. Often called the pure gold “chocolate bar,” the 99.99% pure gold CombiBar can be broken into small pieces of fractional gold, each stamped with its own weight and purity, perfect everyday business transactions.

Or if you prefer using silver, fractional silver rounds provide an easy means to barter. These half-ounce and quarter-ounce rounds are stamped with their weight and purity, making calculating the value easy.

The new SchiffGold Barter Metals page highlights these along with other options available to facilitate barter with precious metals.

We also explain how businesses benefit from accepting gold or silver in trade. In a barter exchange using precious metal, the vendor directly receives real money that will keep its value over time.

One of the biggest problems keeping individuals and businesses from bartering is agreeing on a value for the different types and sizes of coins/rounds/bars. We’ve solved this problem with an innovative widget that displays a single trade price of an ounce of gold and silver in real time:

Want to know what a ¼ oz silver round is worth at trade price? Just take the price per ounce above and divide by 4. It’s that easy. Making change is easy too, because if an item costs ¼ oz of silver and you pay with 1 oz, the vendor can just give you back 3 ¼ ozs rounds (like spending a dollar and getting 3 quarters as change).

Using silver and gold allows you to bypasses the government monopoly on money and conduct business on sound principles. It undercuts the central planner and puts you in control. Peter Schiff sees the growing utilization of gold and silver in barter as a way to jumpstart economic growth:

If gold and silver are successfully re-monetized, our children may know a rate of economic growth not seen since our great-grandparents were in their prime.”

Visit our new Barter Metals page for more information on how to get started today.

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Interested in learning more about physical gold and silver?
Call 1-888-GOLD-160 and speak with a Precious Metals Specialist today!