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We were seriously initiated into living in Buenos Aires this week. We left on Tuesday for Montevideo and on Wednesday at 1:30 P.M. were notified that our apartment had been burglarized Tuesday afternoon.
In our Buenos Aires apartment we have wood slatted coverings, controlled from the inside, that come down over the outside of windows and balcony doors,, securing those possible entry places. We’re always careful to lower those protective blinds when leaving the apartment.
Even though we are on the sixth floor we have heard of thieves in other parts of Buenos Aires breaking into apartments on the 6th and other elevations—from the balconies. Certainly surprises us—but as a result we take careful precautions.
I have always felt perfectly secure here! Kicking in the door in a 27 unit apartment building is something I didn’t expect. There are three other apartments on my floor!The burglary was discovered by the building maintenance manager who called the police—and the police did come. Not only did they come, they assigned a policeman who sealed the badly damaged door and sat in a chair outside all night to prevent further loss.

There are few delusions in South America among the people here. They will tell you that police can steal as well. Not too many rose colored glasses here. But our own experience was good.Lest you think these crime problems are unique to Argentina, one of my relatives is doing renovation work in Florida. He found the job site missing a lot of expensive tools and an air exchanger part of an air conditioner had had the tubing and connections cut and he could see the drag marks to the driveway where it was obviously loaded into a vehicle. He decided to investigate possibilities and visited employees’ homes.There in the front seat of the car of one of the employees was his air exchanger. To make a long story shorter, he called the police who, unlike police in Buenos Aires, did not respond. An hour later he phoned them again and they said they had higher priority calls. He had blocked the perpetrator and the police instructed him by phone that he could NOT block the driveway and that he must move his vehicle. The perpetrator then jumped in his car and returned the air exchanger to the building. The police would not prosecute because he returned it.  In effect, the police did not come at all.

I had a similar experience a few years ago when there was shooting and then a struggle in the middle of the night on our dock in Grant, Florida. I called the police, and then watched the struggle in the darkness from our large window facing the water. Thirty minutes later I called 911 again. They insisted the police were on the scene and I insisted they were not.

Finally, with no further activity on the dock for quite a long time, and no police on the scene, I went back to bed—and THEN came the knock on the door. The officer wanted to know what I had seen and then went over to check the dock.

We are learning through hard experience that a much more cautious and defensive mindset is required for the times in which we are living, and that we must develop skills to take care of ourselves and our families instead of expecting someone else to take care of us.

Returning to another era, in the 1930s in the US, when the country was in severe depression for years and some people in the United States died of malnutrition—a fact not normally mentioned–I hear people say that the depression really wasn’t so bad. All I can say is they were not there. All of my grandparents’ children, with their wives, moved back to the family home because the grandparents owned it free and clear. The entire family avoided the street because their parents’ home was secure. They kept chickens, raised a garden, those who could find work, did. How many grandparents in the U.S. can offer that to their families today?

By comparison how many in South America can offer that?

There are very few mortgages in South America. People pay cash for homes. Sometimes a couple will save half the cost of a home and a relative will lend them money for the balance. We think that far fewer families here will lose everything in a crisis. Most homes here are actually owned by the owners, not the bank!

Statistics show that the depression years in the U.S. were among the most law abiding times in American history. Do you think that standard still exists?

Now is the time to analyze these things and plan accordingly.  There are reasons that most of our financial analysts are saying if you live in a large city, now is the time to transition to a small town if you can, and build a support group there. Looking at the way that crises have been handled in Detroit and Louisiana gives plenty of reason not to be caught in a large town in a crisis. One analyst that we heard this week, Catherine Fitts, stated that if you live in a town like that and hear of civil unrest starting anywhere in town, it’s a good time to vacation for a few days to another area. Just get out of town until it’s over. But it is best to relocate if possible.

We subscribe to a number of writers involved in investment and finance. Several are leaving the United States or have left. Bob Chapman, before his death, was living in Mexico, Doug Casey lives internationally in Argentina, Uruguay and New Zealand, James Sinclair has announced that the time has come to leave the States and had his U. S. compound up for auction the last we knew. You could name a few of your own I’m sure.

There are other successful economics analysts who are not leaving the States. Gerald Celente was in South America, considering establishing a retreat, but he decided to stay in the States and is buying older historical buildings symbolic of restoring the country   We are not convinced that he did not set up anything while he was here in South America. Catherine Austin Fitts is not leaving, but she did move out of New York to a small town in Tennessee and suggests that you do something similar.

Out of curiosity, we wrote to one economic writer that we like, who never mentions any of this in his writing, to ask his opinion of it all. Does he agree with the others? He wrote back that he has a remote retreat in South America and another one in the United States.

So we consider this a good clue for us from those in the know. Prepare now. Will we face the worst case scenario? We think probably not. And yet we don’t know and we don’t think anyone knows. We don’t panic over the prognostications of the doomsayers, but we like to have our bases covered.

It seems to us that we are in a time of change. Times of change are always precarious. This one reminds us of coming in by boat from a fishing trip in the Atlantic, through the Sebastian Inlet near Sebastian, Florida. You could come and go through that inlet just fine, EXCEPT if you did it during the changing of the tide. During that period of change, there was a chance of your making it through intact if you knew what you were doing. But that ocean put many a fishing boat on the bottom of that channel during the changing of the tide.

The changing of the tide is a game changer on many levels. For example, a few years ago it just was not worth raising your own food. Food in the US was cheap and clean, as far as we knew, at least. That has changed.  This is a time when it has become worthwhile to do things yourself that didn’t make sense a few years ago. Growing your own food has several benefits. First, using heirloom seeds and organic gardening, you can feed your family food that will contribute to health and not sickness. You cannot put a price on that.  The next benefit is financial. Health is a factor in finance as well. It means less sickness and missed time from business, less medical costs and less (no) money spent on prescriptions. Then there is the financial savings from just having free food, except for the labor. And depending on your tax rate, if you buy $100 worth of food in the grocery store with earned money, you have to earn perhaps $135 in order to buy $100 for food because you had to pay taxes on that income before you ever went shopping! And this is only one of many examples.

This is how we see our current situation. The tide is changing. Nothing is the same as usual. It is a time to pay attention to the winds, the tide and how we steer our craft. We believe that we can make it through, but it is going to take being willing to face facts, to learn, and to change where necessary.  And yet there is a bright side to all this. A VERY bright side for those who are alert.

All times of change provide fabulous opportunity for those who watch for them. So while we use the good intelligence that God gave us to decide our own course of action, let’s also pay attention to opportunities that always present in times of change.  There will be many. Raising our eyes to look abroad expands those opportunities and gives us more options.

Keeping our eyes open for opportunity . . . and looking forward to seeing you again next week . . . .

Arlean