Pleasant, reliable, and knowledgeable precious metals experiences for our customers and friends.
We sell “lifeboats” and “ammunition storage”. This may sound funny but there are many places that a person can put their money these days and we have two basic philosophies over here.
The first is that there are great gains to be made in unsettled economies and before any vessel takes out into open water it should have a decent life raft, with the hope of never needing it. By simply having it the explorers can take bigger risk and go on greater adventures.
The second philosophy we believe is that every now and then a person just needs a good place to store cash for little while in a way that preserves its purchasing power. Many of us in the investment world are being bombarded with decisions, and a great deal of them look like they have poor, possibly negative, returns—so we aren’t quite sure which way to fire our “guns”. With the current volatility of the market there is a very high likelihood that a clear investment opportunity, that you are knowledgeable about and comfortable with, will appear in the future. In the mean time we provide “ammunition storage”, so that your cash will have the same, or greater, purchasing power, while you wait for you next profitable, large, slow-moving target.
We generally recommend 10% of your net worth to be put in your “lifeboat” and that you hope it “goes to zero”. (If it goes to zero, that means that your other investments have sky rocketed.) If you think we are headed for stormy weather, and dangerous water, we encourage more than 10% though, but if you feel that we are in calm clear seas for the long haul…then we recommend 9%. P.S. The Titanic was unsinkable.
As far as ammunition storage goes, we are optimistic. We believe in the innovative spirit of our countrymen. We think that despite the probable onset of a few of storms in the future, some of which may last longer than most of us will be comfortable with, we believe that there will be great deals on the back end. We look forward to taking advantage of them with an un-depreciated, superior form of cash, Gold and Silver.
by Christopher and Elizabeth LaBorde (kid #1 and kid #2)
“The children’s book writer of concepts of the economy”
This statement in no way dilutes the value of the complexity of the concepts covered in this site but more accurately speaks to the way in which he presents his commentary and his overall pleasant, conversational nature…
To know our father is to know the components of a man who likes to smile, loves his wife, loves his children, enjoys the company of a few good dogs, has been whole-ly committed to his family’s water well drilling operation since he graduated from college and started this company to help people buy “life rafts” because his barometer started to show STORM in 2001. Of course he’s not a total saint out of a fairy-tale but he is a pretty darn good man and if you would like to keep reading we would like to tell you who you are in a relationship with on the other end of the email or phone line. If you would like his professional stats he is on Linked in at: http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=23355556&trk=tyah
At the age of eight he made his first precious metals transaction. As enterprising youngsters, with his ears and eyes wide open, he heard that the new quarters (1965) were being made of scrap metal and that they weren’t as valuable as the old ones. Armed with this insider information he decided to start charming the bank tellers and the lunch ladies into saving the pre-’65 quarters for him so that he could trade them for new quarters that he was picking up in stores in other transactions around town. At the time he didn’t fully realize that he was accumulating junk bags but he knew that silver had to be worth more than “scrap metal”. This continued for a while until the adventures that little boys and young men get into took over.
In high school dad got bit by many bugs. Like most young men our father was bitten by the car bug, the girls bug, the work bug, the water skiing bug, the flying bug and most lastingly, the love bug. The two of them met on a friend’s ski boat doing what teenagers do in North Louisiana in the summers, socialize in water. To hear the two of them tell their story, and admittedly love stories get better with time, they both fell head over heals for each other and became completely infatuated with each other that summer. Mom stated that she had not met anyone like him, “he had an unwavering confidence”. Dad later skipped MIT to go to school closer to where she had to finish her senior year of high school and also stated that he had never met anyone like her either. In their words, “we just knew.” Naturally this meant that their parents were terrified and completely against it; but as luck, fate and an ocean liner’s worth of hard work would have it, they were right. To this day both consider themselves very fortunate to have found each other. Our parent are both quick to say that it’s not so much a matter of finding the right person as being the right person. We have included this part of our father’s story because we feel it’s pretty telling. We have also included it because our parents come as a match set and if you are talking to one of them, you are talking to both of them.
Before these two got married they were told that they had to understand that conceiving children of their own was not possible due to some health issues. The two, at 19, knew they wanted each other and figured adoption would be part of their future. Two years later in late July in the summer of 1979 they experienced their first medical miracle and Christopher was born. I was what they called a “miracle baby”, and probably because it should have been the sight of my father’s first heart attack as the timing was a touch early. Twenty one, living in the married student apartments, about to finish a civil engineering degree,,, Larry is a family man. Three years into a four year degree it was time to take a fully loaded semester and negotiate an early departure from school to come back to the family business and start “bread-winning”. In other words the race of life was on! The good news for him was that the family business was growing and could use his skill set. The position quickly went from project manager to project manager and president as my grandfather saw a clear path to get back out of the office.
For the next twenty five years the story had a consistent cadence, the company grew and prospered, and the years flew by.
As time went on he did exactly what he thought he was supposed to do as the bread winner for his family, he did what most people do and then like many others before him he realized that what he thought he was supposed to be doing caused him to miss something…
Somewhere after kiddo number 1 went to college, graduated from college and then reported back from the field that he had no desire to take on a position as the third generation of the family company our father started to wonder why he was carrying the torch as hard as he had been. Also in that time frame Kiddo number 2 seemed to be demonstrating what having a GREAT TIME in life actually looked like. Between the two, the door started to crack even further in his mind that an evaluation of priorities might be needed. As it turns out the personality traits that make for a really successful focused bread winner are typically not always the same set of traits that make for a full time all around balanced life (many of you reading may feel somewhat akin to this as it is a common trend with successful folks). Through extraordinary luck of brilliant parenting from his Personal Goddess, our lovely mother, and two genius children (US ), our father hit his stride and re-found his magic feather that sent him soaring after he had a couple moments of serious self discovery and priority re-alignment. At this point in his story he decided that it was time to empower his little brother and start teaching him how to take care of operations in the family business so that he could step down a operations manager and move into on-the-road-sales, where he would finally get a chance to converse and chat with all of the people he knew from the other end of the telephone for all of those years. Things were going pretty well at this point… (Check out his article “Mid Life Crisis)
As life would have it’s humor to it, he was only able to get through about half of his formal desired training program in with is younger brother when he had what the nurse called a “Massive Heart Attack”, to which he replied over and over again while coming out of sedation, “Are you sure it wasn’t reflux, I had a lot of onions at lunch.”
Welcome to the new new chapter in the story of Larry LaBorde. At this point dad had even more inspiration to become the person he wanted to be and change his ways (with this last paragraph there are probably even more of you out there who can relate to this story, as I have heard this also seems to be another stamp attained for many successful folks on the path to realization).
Who is Larry LaBorde version 3.0? As you have read, Larry 2.0 was well on his way to shifting his priorities to a more meaningful set and with the added inspiration of the “reflux incident” we got to watch our father truly become the person he wanted to become, but not before watching him “code” first. As my sister and I write this we are giggling a little—partly from the awkward tension that comes from scary truths, partly because we laugh at our own jokes and lastly because the whole opera played out very well and we got to watch a good man become even better. Call him, he’s a pretty fun guy to talk with and now you know a little about him.
Slightly biased writers,
Christopher and Elizabeth LaBorde
