Don't just dream about paradise, live it with Fiji Airways. Escape the ordinary with Fiji Airways Global Beat the Rush Sale. Immerse yourself in white sandy beaches or dive deep into coral reefs. Fiji Airways has flights to Nadi starting at just $748 for light and just $798 for value. Discover your tropical dreams at FijiAirways.com.

That's FijiAirways.com. From here to happy. Flying direct with Fiji Airways. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while also building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

On today's show, I welcome back past guest of Radical Personal Finance, James Wesley Rawls. Jim is an author, most famously of the largest survival website on the internet called Survival Blog.com. He's also written a series of novels. He comes from a military background and also has a deep level of expertise in survivalism and preparedness.

But he also, most interestingly for today's show, has a deep level of expertise on the subject of firearms. Specifically, I've invited him on today to discuss how to invest in guns, how you can diversify your investments by purchasing, owning, trading, investing in guns. I'm really excited to bring this show to you because I think it will be practically useful to those of you who wish to pursue this course of action.

It will also be theoretically interesting to those of you who are just interested in considering investment markets. I think guns are a unique asset class. This episode advances one of my major agendas with Radical Personal Finance. Over time, my hope is that I can change the way that people in general think about investing.

Over time, I'd like to undo a lot of the marketing work of the financial world. Today, if I say "investment" to the average person on the street, they automatically think of something like a mutual fund held within a retirement account. Now, although that is one perfectly valid way to think about investing, that's primarily a concept that has been sold to you systematically by the financial industry over the last few decades.

That's not the only way to invest, and it's not even necessarily the best way to invest. It's simply one way to invest that has certain attributes, certain characteristics, but there are many other ways to invest. I like to profile some of those different approaches to investing, which is why I'm excited to bring you today's episode.

Guns are unique, and I love thinking about the marketplace from an investment perspective because of some of the underlying characteristics. So before I play the interview, I want to talk with you about seven interesting characteristics of the firearms marketplace that you should consider and consider how they apply to your own situation with possibly your interest in investing in guns or how they apply to other types of marketplaces that you see around you that might be more familiar to you.

First thing I'd like to discuss is the underlying value and floor of an investment. One fear that many people have about investing in certain types of assets is that somehow the marketplace could disintegrate and the value of that asset could be driven to zero. Now a lot of times this fear is unfounded.

For example, if you invest in the assets of a company through purchasing shares of its stock, it's a rare company which would actually fall to a value of zero in the marketplace. Most companies have some level of equipment and physical plant and equipment, things that could be sold at a bankruptcy auction to have some underlying value.

Not all companies. Some companies are simply primarily their value is composed of intellectual property rights and if for some reason those intellectual property rights become worthless, well then theoretically the value of the stock could plummet to zero or perhaps as the investor and owner of a company, the company could acquire so much debt that the creditors would take any value of the company before you were to receive any residual value.

So it is possible that stocks can decline in value to zero but it's unlikely for most well-run companies. But it's often hard for people to visualize this when thinking about paper-based assets like stocks and bonds, things like that. But there are many other ways where you can see the underlying floor and this is one very attractive feature of firearms.

Guns have today and as far as I can tell will always have some underlying intrinsic value as a tool. That tool might be for the purpose of hunting food, defending yourself from physical attack or simply a tool for fun by engaging in various aspects of the shooting sports. But that underlying value as a tool, the intrinsic value, leads to their having a fascinating price floor because of their utility.

Now this is a unique characteristic and it's something I think we should pay attention to when considering investments. There are other items you could invest in that have that feature. For example, a functioning automobile is always going to have at least a certain value. I don't know what that market value is in your area but where I live, if a car works, you can always sell it for at least 500 bucks.

If it gets you from point A to point B, who knows how long it's going to do that. But if it gets you there, it's going to be at least worth 500 bucks. In Florida, bonus points if the AC works, that adds another 500 bucks to your value. A car with a working AC has a price floor of 1,000 bucks.

It doesn't matter how ugly, how reliable, you can sell it for 1,000 bucks if it has a working air conditioning. But automobiles generally tend to degrade over time. There are other things that you could do as well. I've always been fascinated by the market for physical coins. One of the benefits of some aspects of the coin marketplace is you have an underlying floor of value based upon the currency value of your investment.

For example, if you're purchasing US currency pre-1965, US silver dimes, quarters and half dollars, well, the value of those coins is primarily going to be driven by the melt value of the silver marketplace. But if the value of silver were to plummet to effectively zero because all of the demand for silver disappeared, those coins have an underlying floor of value based upon their face value.

A dime is always going to be worth at least 10 cents as long as the US economy and world economy is functioned and denominated in terms of dollars. Or today, some people invest in physical nickels for the same purpose. They have a melt value of a certain number based upon the value of the physical nickel as a commodity, but they always are worth at least five cents as a currency.

This is an interesting floor. This is not only applicable to coins or guns. You could do this – you could find this in land and buildings. When you own a rental house, that rental house always has a certain value based upon its utility as shelter, either shelter that you can rent or sell.

As long as people need or want shelter, it's going to have a certain value. If you own a warehouse, it's going to have a certain value as large shelter for a business that needs a warehouse. Raw land might have a basic value partly judged by the marketplace, its desirability in a certain climate, what's going on in the local economy.

But if it has timber on it, there's a certain value simply based upon your being able to harvest and sell the timber. You can apply this to other types of tools. A snap-on wrench to a mechanic is always going to have some certain residual value as a high-quality tool.

I was fascinated a few years ago when preparing for the birth of our first baby. My wife and I were buying cloth diapers and I couldn't believe that a used cloth diaper has an incredibly high residual value. Blew my mind. Used cloth diapers have an extremely high residual value when measured against their new purchase price.

Amazing. If you want to cloth diaper your kid, you can sell all your diapers out at the end of your kids using them for a very high value proportionally speaking. So this fundamental underlying value is something we should look for and guns have that. They have that historically. Historically guns are the great leveling influence in human society.

A gun is what makes a weak 80-year-old woman capable to defend herself against an aggressor or a young lady. A gun makes her powerful against a stronger male attacker. If you look at the history of liberty and freedom throughout the world, widespread gun ownership promotes a healthy respect for the general population by those who wish to be a part of the ruling class.

It's a fascinating historical study when you go and study different cultures as they've developed. So there's a long market and even today, guns will always find a ready market value at some price at the gun shows or pawn shops or back alleys of every city of the world. This is unique as an investment attribute.

It's kind of hard to walk into a pawn shop and sell a few shares of stock, but it's pretty easy to walk into a pawn shop and get a low but practical price on the sale of any firearm. Guns are also interesting. My second point in that they have a unique and incredible durability.

As a physical item, they have an incredible durability. When cared for and prepared properly for protection against the physical elements, a gun is a physical item that can be sealed up in a vault for 100 years or more and that gun will emerge as fully capable of its intended purpose as it is today.

I own a pistol that my grandfather wore on his belt every day as a rancher in the mountains of Colorado 75 years ago and it shoots just as well today as it did then. I own a rifle that he used to harvest deer for, feed his family, and it functions every bit as reliably today as it did then.

If I want to take it out hunting, it will work just as well. Interesting thing, there is a subcategory in the gun marketplace of machine guns. Most of these fully automatic machine guns are decades old, but their values is huge. Their values are huge simply based upon the legislation that governs them.

Third point about investing in guns is there are many ways to access the gun market for investment purposes at various dollar amounts. Just no matter how much money you would actually like to invest in guns, in today's interview, you're going to find out some ways to do it. Rawls discusses in today's interview how you can speculate on – if you'd like to speculate, you can speculate on the impact of future government legislation of paramilitary style semi-automatic sporting rifles with the ownership of a $19 part.

So if you want to invest 100 bucks and speculate on what the US government will do with regard to gun control legislation, you can get into it for 19 bucks. Now if you think that – so if you predict future more restrictive gun laws, you might want to pay attention to that way of doing it.

Or if you've got more money to work with, you could easily invest a few thousand bucks just into purchasing some rifles or you could put tens of thousands of dollars to work in the ownership and trading of fully automatic rifles and machine guns if you're willing to deal with the paperwork requirements of them.

Another interesting feature to guns is they can be very compact and portable. You could relatively easily store $50,000 or $100,000 worth of firearms in a large home safe in your spare bedroom. If needed, you could transport that high dollar value of property in the trunk of a large car or the back of an SUV or a pickup truck.

It's a little bit different as far as the compactness of wealth than say purchasing a house. So there's an interesting dynamic to the portability and the compact nature and ability to store wealth. Fifth, guns have an almost infinite level of specialization. So as a marketplace, it's fascinating to consider it in the aggregate as far as guns, which is a somewhat nondescriptive term, versus certain types of guns.

It's a perfect market into which you can apply specialized knowledge to gain a competitive advantage. Sixth, guns have the unique feature of generally always being in high demand. Personally, it's a rare gun owner that I know who owns only one. So there's always a strong market among existing gun owners.

I know some of you are international listeners and the markets in your country are different than they are in the United States of America. But there's generally a strong market. Although I'm sure they must exist somewhere, I've never personally met anyone who, after owning a gun or multiple guns, generally voluntarily becomes a non-gun owner.

Sure, people get rid of guns. But if you look at the weapons collected in gun buyback programs, you usually find some intelligent business people trading in worthless, inoperable hunks of junk to their local police department in exchange for some very useful cash or gift cards if that's what they're using.

So here's a little market tip for you. If you ever hear of your local police department holding a gun buyback program, get some cash together and set up – grab a table and go use it. See if you can make some money. What a lot of gun owners do is when the local police department is having a gun buyback program, they'll come down and set up a table and offer people cash, more cash than the local police department is offering for their – for the gun buyback.

So you can often – if there is anyone selling in a weapon that actually works or is worth having, you can usually get it at a nice price and get yourself a good gun at a great discount. Plus, you can consider yourself to be doing your patriotic duty by getting that gun off the street and safely sequestering it into your safe, keeping it out of the hands of criminals.

Or another little interesting marketplace thing, if the police department is offering a lot of money, sometimes it can be worth it to go buy cheap guns from a different market and sell them into the buyback program in order to make some money. There are some great stories of that happening at an Oakland, California gun buyback program back in 2008 where a bunch of gun owners went and purchased guns at another market for cheap and they were – I think they were paying 250 bucks for them and they sold them all to the police department, 250 bucks, and took some nice cash.

So just pay attention for those little markets. As in anything, there's always interesting times to buy and to sell. Seventh attribute of the gun market, which I think is very fascinating, is it's a market that's subject to external influence, specifically legislative influence. Jim and I discussed this at the very beginning of today's interview, which is why I wanted to release this interview to you now in a timely manner because it will make a fascinating case study as we watch what happens in the next year or so.

Now as with any marketplace, you should pay attention and think about the gun marketplace as a way to analyze the risks. For example, if you go out and buy guns, you have to know what you're buying. You have to build and rely on your own knowledge and skill or you have to establish a relationship with a trusted broker, somebody that you can count on to help you with their knowledge and skill.

You have to physically protect your investment. This is something that we're not generally accustomed to thinking of. We only think of it when our bank gets hacked or our brokerage company gets subjected to a criminal operation that's trying to deal with them. But you have to physically protect your investment.

You have to know the market and there are very large market risks. For example, you might misread the legislative direction in your country. What's the trend? Is it toward tighter restrictions on gun ownership or looser restrictions on gun ownership? You would have to calculate technological changes. Certain types of guns might be more valued in the future than others or you'd have to calculate the impact of 3D printing on your investment portfolio.

A decade from now, maybe a little more, maybe a little less. I'm just speculating on the timing but probably a decade from now, any of us who desires to can mass produce our own guns on the 3D printers in our spare bedrooms. So how will that impact the market value of your investments?

A more typical question, how will that impact the market value of your guns or any of your investment portfolio, any asset class simply as it adjusts the political tone of the world? How does 3D printing impact the control and imposition of tyranny by governments around the world? I have no idea.

You have to figure that out. So some of these features are unique to the gun market and some are not. I'll try to cover other interesting markets in the future. I'm trying to get my mechanic to come on. He's got a $180,000 Porsche sitting in the back of his garage and I want to talk about investing in classic cars and things like that.

There's all these interesting markets and whether or not you care to participate, I don't personally care to do anything with cars. That interests me not the least. Still study a market and then look around you and think about how you can apply that knowledge. But today in light of the forthcoming presidential elections, I'd like to discuss with you how to diversify your investment portfolio by investing in guns.

Jim Rawls, welcome back to Radical Personal Finance. >>Jim Rawls: Thank you so much for having me on. >>Aaron Powell, House of Representatives Spokesman>> So we're going to tackle a topic that I think is very exciting and is sure to anger some people and sure to intrigue many. But I want to talk about guns, specifically the topic of investing in guns.

Although I've owned guns and shot guns for a very long time, I'm an absolute neophyte when it comes to the ability to assess the value, the ability to understand the marketplace, etc. In light of the forthcoming presidential election, I feel like this is an interesting time to tackle the topic because depending on what happens, it could affect the values of guns.

So I said, "Well, who better to discuss this topic than one of the most knowledgeable men I know, Jim Rawls?" So thank you for being willing to do this interview with me. >>Jim Rawls: Sure. I'm happy to be here to do this. I want to start out with the caveat that nobody knows what's going to happen at the upcoming presidential conventions, the campaign conventions for the two major parties.

I think that it's very likely that Hillary Clinton is going to get nominated despite the fact that she should really be in prison. If she does, I can predict that immediately after she's nominated, there will be a realization nationwide that she will probably win the election and that when she gets in office, she's going to try to enact a lot of so-called gun control measures.

I like to refer to them as civilian disarmament measures. So I have a feeling, it's just a gut level feeling and it's based on many years of experience as a firearms trader, that the price of most black rifles and their magazines and the ammunition in those primary battle rifle calibers like 5.56 NATO, 7.62 NATO, 7.62 by 39, which is the AK-47 cartridge, and 5.45 by 39, which is the AK-74 cartridge.

Basically everything is going to double in price and the availability will become very, very limited. There will be basically a run on everything. The stores will get cleaned out, at least of all the military calibers and the main defensive handgun calibers. High capacity or what I refer to as standard capacity magazines will be very hard to find.

And again, basically across the board, I think prices are going to double on selected items. So it's wise, if I was in a situation where I was a stock picker and I knew for certain that a company was going to be releasing a new product and it was going to double the value of that stock, I would want to publicize it, right?

Well, of course, I'd want to invest myself first. And then publicize it. And I'm kind of in that situation right now with firearms in that I can see the handwriting on the wall. I've seen what's happened in the past when there have been crises where it has the Democrat Party and the mass media, their buddies, all screaming for more gun control.

The first thing that happens is that everybody rushes to the gun shows, they rush to the gun store, everything gets cleaned out, prices get jacked up, and people are frantic. So in my line of business, which is the preparedness business, I like to say panic now and avoid the rush.

And instead of really panicking, people need to very dispassionately just think about what they need for their own families, think in terms of both your immediate family and also your future, your progeny, the future generations, what your descendants are going to need and stock up accordingly. And then with any extra money that you have for investing for guns that you plan to actually turn over, try to buy guns that are going to be in the highest demand and the shortest supply.

It's just common sense. So before we go to the specific practical application, I want to talk a little bit about the market. And for the sake of the record, you and I are recording this on April 22, 2016. So as you said, we don't know anything about what's going to happen at upcoming political conventions.

We don't know what's going to happen with the presidential candidates. We don't know what scandals are going to emerge. We don't know if the FBI is going to announce their findings on Hillary Clinton, all these things. I'll tell you, I think that if anyone could ever be elected president while under indictment or after conviction and a presidential pardon, it's probably Hillary Clinton.

I believe it. So I have been – I mean for quite a while, I've simply assumed personally for the sake of my own purposes, I've assumed that Hillary Clinton will win the presidency. And who knows what will happen with the political makeup of Congress and of the Senate. But I've just assumed – Yeah, the Supreme Court.

But I've assumed for my own planning purposes that Hillary Clinton will win and at the moment I have no reason to assume anything else. But I also recognize that I could be wrong and that's where I want to talk about because in my mind, the firearms marketplace demonstrates exactly the challenge.

Here's what I see as a layperson and I want to ask you this question. On the one hand, it would seem easy for me to predict that, OK, if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, then there will be a barrage of new restrictions and gun laws, et cetera, which would lead to additional restrictions on the acquisition of certain types of firearms and therefore because of the decreased supply, the demand will rise and thus the price will rise.

But the major concerns that I have are threefold. One, historically, we've gone through these ebbs and flows. So I'm only 30 years old. So I went back during Bill Clinton and the Brady campaign and things like that. I was not practically aware. I studied those things as a matter of history rather than as a matter of actual experience.

But it's been difficult for me to discern the actual historical record. On the one hand, it seems like many people are constantly clamoring for additional restrictions on firearms ownership. But when you actually look at the facts, specifically the best example on Wikipedia, there's a great animated map of – for example, the spread of the concealed carry laws.

It's just a march of freedom. Exactly. So you've got this steady overturnment of laws. When I look at the last eight years under President Obama and I just observe what has happened, it's hard for me to imagine a political candidate who is – would like to do more. But yet in practical reality, I'm not aware of any major substantive restrictions that have actually been put in place.

So I feel like most of what we see is political posturing. So what if even though Hillary Clinton – let's assume she were elected, how do we know anything – how do we know she could actually do anything? Right. Well, she could do a lot of things by executive order and that's completely absent any input from Congress or the courts.

So why hasn't President Obama done that then? I think Obama has been reluctant to do too many executive orders. But I'm not sure if Clinton will have that same reluctance because she has an outlook on life that's very proactive. If you look at the way she was involved behind the scenes with the predecessor of Obamacare, in the very first year of the Bill Clinton – the first Bill Clinton presidency, she was chairing the committee for a socialized medicine plan for the United States.

And in fact, the minutes of all those meetings have never been released. But she was apparently very proactive. She wanted it immediately and she was horribly disappointed when it didn't happen. So I think that's her basic outlook. She's proactive and I think she will push as hard and as fast as she can with executive orders.

Now, the executive orders will primarily involve imports because obviously she can't get involved because of the commerce clause and what goes on inside of each state. But for importation, the presidential power is tremendous. So for anyone who owns any European-made semi-automatic firearms, I strongly recommend that if you want a spare parts set, you order it now.

If you want any extra magazines, if you own a gun like a Steyr AUG or an Israeli Tavor or whatever, you need to get your spare parts and your extra magazines laid in soon because by executive order, Hillary Clinton could ban the importation of any magazine over ten rounds except for law enforcement purposes.

That could very well happen. So you're saying that I should encourage a relative of mine who's been lusting after the new Tavor bullpup to go ahead and pull the trigger and get one? Yes, you should. You can get one of the new X95s which is the Tavor with the improved trigger.

That's the gun to buy. And right now, they're about $1,900. Stock up. If he can afford to buy two or three, he really should because by buying just two of them, if the parts for those become import banned and they can no longer assemble them in the States, instead of a $2,000 rifle, it's going to become a $4,000 rifle.

He can then sell one of those two rifles and then be able to keep the other one effectively for free. So how confident do you feel? So let's say – and we're going to talk about this. Don't worry. I'm not just going to willy-nilly follow your advice. But let's use me as an example.

Let's pretend that I'm not worrying necessarily at this point. We'll come back to this. But I'm not planning to – I'm not planning and trying to prepare for the end of the world as we know it. I'm not trying to create an armory of many rifles of common things.

I just want to speculate on the gun market. How confident would you feel in saying, "Hey, Josh. We'll consider going out and buying a couple of the Tavor bullpups," and for those who aren't familiar with firearm nomenclature, this is a scary black rifle that shoots lots of bullets, which is extremely compact and extremely valuable for those who like to shoot.

Is that an accurate assessment? How confident would you feel in that investment advice? Josh Woodruff: I'd say that's a pretty good investment strategy, although in terms of absolute bang for the buck, in terms of things that will more than double in value if there is a perceived crisis, and I think there will be coming out of the Democratic Convention in the third week of July, starting the third week of July.

The thing to buy actually is, if you can find them, is stripped AR-15 lower receivers. Right now they can be had for as low as $29 a piece. During the last crisis, which was after the Sandy Hook shootings, they were going for $250 a piece. That's a lot of money.

That's a lot of money. It's not a large piece. It's not a large piece. It's not a large piece. It's not a large piece. That's the most valuable. The lower receiver on an AR-15 actually is just a trigger group. It really isn't a receiver, but that's the part that many, many years ago, Eugene Stoner decided to stamp the serial number on and he referred to that group, which most people would refer to as a trigger group, as the lower receiver.

Technically, under the federal law, that receiver constitutes the firearm because that's the piece that carries the serial number. You can build an AR-15 yourself without any special tools just from that lower receiver. You can buy a complete barreled upper receiver and just slap together the gun. The critical component, the one that's going to be in greatest demand, will be that lower receiver.

Traditionally, they've sold for anywhere between $25 and $75 a piece, depending on the maker. The supply has been very, very spotty. During the 1994 to 2004 federal firearms ban, lower receivers were very hard to find. Technically, with that ban, you would have to have assembled a gun before that law went into effect in 1994 to be able to legally possess it.

What a lot of people would do is just take ... They'd buy a bunch of lower receivers and then slap the same upper on that lower, lay it down on a newspaper and take a picture of it. This is even before the days of digital photography. With both the serial number showing and the date of the newspaper showing.

That was their proof that they had assembled that lower receiver before the law went into effect. In this case, if we could end up with another ban on battle rifles, you could do something very similar. But the crucial item to have is that lower receiver itself. Now, if you don't mind signing for them doing the federal paperwork, you can get them for as low as $19.95 a piece if you order them 10 at a time.

If you look around, you can find a local transfer dealer with a federal firearms license who will do transfers for 10% over cost. That's very little money to do a lot of paperwork. Say you wanted to invest $2,000 in 100 AR-15 stripped lower receivers. Even if you don't have a federal firearms license of your own, you could probably get them for around $20 a piece.

If you're a real speculator, you'd go out and buy 100 of them. Go ahead and sign for them. I know you're developing a huge paper trail by doing this. But the upside is if there is another buying frenzy following the Democrat convention in July of 2016, the price of stripped lower receivers will probably jump to somewhere between $200 and $300 a piece.

You would then, during the height of that frenzy, sell them back into the market and recoup a huge profit. Paul Matzko: For some reason, one of the nice backups of that idea is if my recent experience over the last five to ten years with the firearms market is any indication, all you need to do is – even if let's say you weren't gambling on election campaigns and let's say that – I don't know what.

I guess Ted Cruz were to win the presidency. Michael Munger: It's still like fixed inflation. Paul Matzko: Yeah, you still have something that's valuable and then all you have to do is just simply wait for the next terrorist attack, the next mass shooting, whatever it is that the next thing which will come around every few years which will drive the market demand up and then you have a good floor.

Michael Munger: Yeah. That's one of the beauties of free market economics is the ability to buy low and sell high and in my estimation, there is no such thing as hoarding. If you're buying now when supplies are plentiful of anything, whether it's food, wheat grinders, guns, ammunition or whatever, if you're buying now and the pipeline is still full, then you can never be accused of hoarding.

There really is no such thing as hoarding in a true free market. There are only buyers and sellers at a price point. Trevor Burrus: I like the strategy you've outlined simply because even on the flip side, let's say I bought 10 or 20 lower receivers. I could systematically over time simply take those receivers and even if there were no resale value, even if I never wanted to sell them out, I could just over the course of coming years, use those receivers to assemble my own armory.

Michael Munger: Sure. Or you could set them aside for your future grandkids or whatever when they wouldn't be available without any paperwork. Of course the ideal situation is to try to go to gun shows and find them laying on gun show tables. Occasionally, you will find complete lowers, even more rarely stripped lowers available on secondary sales with no paperwork but that is a rarity.

You're probably going to end up having to fill out a federal form 4473 which is the dealer acquisition and sale form to take possession of those. Now I want to kind of back up a little bit and encourage your listeners to get smart about the firearms market. In a lot of ways, the firearms market is similar to the rare coin market and that is it's the savvy, the really astute buyers that make the most money trading in these commodities and the ignorant sheeple who are late to the market and not well informed, the sheep get shorn basically.

Those sheeple are not going to be well positioned to have the knowledge it takes to make a lot of money with firearms. So I recommend that people get smart about firearms. If you go to my website, it's survivalblog.com. In the left hand bar, you'll see a list of links of static pages.

I have one that's titled "Book and Video Shelf". If you click on that, I have several recommendations for books that are available through amazon.com. One of them is called "Flederman's Guide to Antique Firearms and Their Values". Great big fat book that gets updated once every two or three years with a tremendous wealth of information about antique guns.

Anybody who's considering buying a pre-1899 antique gun for investment purposes needs a copy of that book. For modern guns, I would recommend that you get the latest edition. It's also at my bookshelf page. It's called "The Blue Book of Gun Values". That is kind of considered the bible of firearms collecting for modern guns.

If you go to gun shows, you often see a copy of that laying right on the tables being used as a reference by the firearms dealers as they're assessing guns that are handed to them for potential purchase. Again, "Flederman's Guide to Antique Firearms and Their Values" and "The Blue Book of Gun Values".

Those are the two key references that everyone should have. Jim, why would somebody want to buy a 117+ year old gun? Okay, well, also at my website, I have a static page called "The Pre-1899 Antique Firearms FAQ". It was a piece that I co-authored about the amazing little loophole, in fact, I really shouldn't even call it a loophole, the feature in American firearms laws that exempts firearms that were made in or before 1898.

So you can have two identical guns. Say you have a Winchester 3030 lever action, a Model 1894, the classic that everybody knows. The ones that were made in the first four years of production from 1894 to 1898 are already worth about 30% more than ones that were made just a year later, 1899 and later, because under federal law, any gun or just its frame or receiver that was made in or before December 31st of 1898 is not considered a firearm, it's considered an antique.

And as an antique, it is outside of federal jurisdiction, which means that, you know, earlier I was talking about the paperwork you have to fill out when you buy a modern gun. Well, if you buy an antique gun, there's absolutely no paperwork, it's outside of federal jurisdiction, there's no federal nexus.

That gun can go across state lines legally without going through a federally licensed dealer with no paper trail. And a lot of astute firearms collectors know that and they are actively looking for cartridge guns that were made in or before 1898. In the FAQ piece that I wrote, again, it's available free at my website, survivalblog.com.

In the left hand bar, click on the link that's marked FAQ, or FAQS. And if you open up the FAQ file that I have on pre-1899 guns, it describes in detail the legalities, and I also have some very extensive lists of the serial number breaks. Say you're at a gun show, you see a really old Winchester and you're wondering, "Could this be one of those ones that was made in 1898 or earlier?" If you have a printout of that FAQ article that I wrote, I have the serial number breaks that will show you that if, with a particular serial number, for a particular make and model of gun, what the break is for pre-1899 versus post-1899.

It's a pretty valuable reference, and again, I make it available free at my website. The guns, the antique guns that I recommend buying are the ones from the 1890s that shoot modern cartridges. They're not muzzle loaders, these are repeating cartridge guns, usually lever action, pump action, or bolt action.

Again, they're completely outside of federal jurisdiction, but they will shoot a deer just as dead as a modern gun at the same range. In fact, you can legally sporterize one of these guns and put a modern scope on it, and even put it in a modern Kevlar graphite stock if you want to.

They're perfectly capable guns, but if you buy ones in the right serial number ranges, they'll be made before 1899, and they'll be chambered in a cartridge that's still factory made. The ones that I recommend are things like the Swedish Mausers that are chambered in 6.5x55 Swedish Mauser. They're dated right on the receiver ring, 1898, 1896, whatever, right on the receiver ring, so there's absolutely no doubt when those guns were made.

I recommend Mauser bolt actions that were made in or before 1898, Smith & Wesson top break revolvers, particularly 38s and 4440s that were made in or before 1898, and also Winchester Model 1897 pump action shotguns that were made in the first two years of production. There's only about, I think there were about what, 35,000 made, but you can still find them at gun shows if you look around, or you can find them of course just by the mail order.

If you search at gunbroker.com or gunsamerica.com, they usually, in fact they even have a separate section just for pre-1899 guns. If you want to invest in a couple of antiques, especially if you're politically paranoid and you think that we may ever have a nationwide gun registration, that would be a really good category of guns to invest in, because right now, pre-1899 guns sell for about a 30% premium over an absolutely identical model, identical condition gun that was made in 1899 or later.

I think in the long run, they'll be at as much as a 100% or 200% premium on those guns if we ever have nationwide gun registration, because it'll only be those guns that are outside of federal jurisdiction and exempt from registration. But couldn't the new, if we did, let's say, okay, we're going to have a national gun registration system, couldn't that law and that legislation simply include pre-1899 firearms as well?

But that 1898 threshold hasn't changed since 1968, so the pool of guns out there, the available supply of pre-1899 guns is actually gradually shrinking. In the eyes of the typical DC beltway politician, they really consider them a non-issue. Unless one was ever used in a really high profile event, and here we're talking Lee Harvey Oswald or something like that, unless one was horribly misused, I don't think they're ever going to get around to including those in any federal laws.

And in the eyes of the courts, it's a really, really long stretch to come before the Supreme Court and say, "Oh, Mr. Supreme Court Justices, these guns that were made in 1898 or earlier are still engaged, are still part of interstate commerce. These guns have been out of interstate commerce for 117 years, so you really can't claim federal jurisdiction." I don't think the courts would hold that up if they ever tried to bring them into federal jurisdiction at this point.

Again, that very arbitrary 1898 cutoff date has been set in stone since the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968. Technically, they really should have just defined "antique" as a gun that is 100 years old or older, and then that threshold would have rolled forward one year each December 31st.

But instead, they arbitrarily locked it in as December 31st, 1898, and it's been frozen there ever since 1968. So I think, again, in the eyes of the politician, they consider them a non-issue, and I think that exemption will continue at least for our generation or maybe even future generations.

What are some of the other interesting little value wrinkles in the gun marketplace, little corners of the market where you get an unexpected premium based upon certain characteristics? Well, the rarity of a particular gun is, of course, the main driving factor. One of the guns that I've liked to collect over the years were the semi-auto battle rifles made by a Finnish company called Valmet, V-A-L-M-E-T.

They have been out of the firearms business since about the year 2000, and there have been none imported into the United States in military configuration since about 1992. So the supply of those guns is fixed. There are new collectors coming out of the market constantly. Ten years ago, I was buying Valmets for around $2,000 a piece.

Right now, they're between $4,000 and $6,000 a piece, and the sky's the limit because, again, they've frozen the supply. And in fact, the tooling for the Valmet rifles actually was destroyed after a corporate merger. The same corporation that Valmet became also acquired HK, Heckler & Koch, from Germany, which is also a very well-known battle rifle maker.

And apparently, the executives at HK did not like the idea of having competition within their own company, and they asked the corporate management to destroy the tooling for the Valmet firearms. So there will be no more Valmets ever made, unless they somehow magically recreate the tooling. So I think that Valmets are one particularly good for the really high-end collector who already has a pretty complete battery of firearms, and they're looking to diversify.

I would say either Valmets or another good category would be the accidental import FN FALs. An FN is a .308 battle rifle. It's a big, long, black rifle with a 20-round magazine. The early ones were brought in by Browning Arms, and there were several other importers since then. They're no longer imported.

There are some domestically made FALs, but the supply of original Belgian-European-made FALs is essentially frozen as well. And the early, early ones are what's called a G-series FAL. Those were considered an accidental import, because if they were imported now, they would be legally considered a machine gun, because they have a cut in the lower receiver for an auto sear, and they wouldn't be importable in that configuration now.

You don't have to register them as a machine gun, but everybody knows that they're a gun that would be easy to convert to full auto, and people are willing to pay a premium for them for that reason. Again, that's called a G-series FAL. Tim, the reason I broached this topic on radical personal finance is I teach people to invest in what they know.

I think as a background of a financial advisor, professional financial advisor, I think that we as financial advisors do the public a disservice, wherein we primarily shuttle people directly into mutual funds, and that's the extent of our investment knowledge. But as I've interacted with lots of rich people, what I've found is that many people have insider knowledge on a specific marketplace, and they've been able to exploit that marketplace for their own financial gain.

Now, for some people, this is local single-family houses. For other people, it's large ranches. For some people, it's guns. For other people, it's Porsches. For some people, it's collectible coins. For other people, it's Barbie dolls. Describe for me your development as a firearms investor, and tell us how this has impacted your financial life.

Sure. Well, I was born in 1960. I started collecting guns as a teenager. Immediately after turning 21, I got a federal firearms license while I was still in college, and I guess in retrospect, I can safely say that I sold quite a few guns out of my dorm room with my federal firearms license, even though it was against the campus policy.

I started attending gun shows about 1980, and have been attending gun shows pretty regularly ever since. So I'm a pretty savvy collector. I've developed a lot of knowledge, but what I would recommend for your listeners is that they pick a particular area in the firearms market to study up on.

If you get smart and you master the knowledge of a particular maker or even just a particular maker and a particular model of firearm, and then you attend gun shows, you can walk through a gun show. In fact, you could scan a gun show very quickly just looking for that particular model gun based on its outline.

You can walk through a gun show, hit all the aisles of a gun show in the first 20 minutes after a gun show opens, and then jot down the table locations or memorize the table locations to go back and talk to those dealers. Based on your knowledge of that particular model and paying very close attention to things like bore condition, you want to carry a bore inspection light with you.

It's a fiber optic light that you shine up a firearms bore so you can closely inspect the condition of the bore, which is one of the crucial factors of firearms condition. But based on your knowledge of that particular model, you can literally buy a gun at one side of a gun show from an elderly collector who's getting rid of a collection and doesn't realize what something is now worth.

You buy that gun, you walk it over to the other side of the show where you see a dealer who has a similar assortment of guns, and based on your market knowledge, turn around and resale that gun at wholesale and still make a 20% profit. The same kind of thing goes on in the coin market all the time with ungraded coins.

But there it's an even more arcane knowledge based on the Sheldon scale of coin grading. I don't want to go into that, but I'm sure you've had other guests who have described that. It's a pretty arcane body of knowledge, but if you can master that knowledge, have that between your ears, that is very valuable knowledge.

I would recommend that, say if someone has an interest in Colt single action revolvers, or Winchester lever action rifles, or Colt AR-15s, or M1 carbines, or whatever. Whatever guns interest you, do the research. Nowadays you don't even have to go through back issues of magazines to develop that body of knowledge.

All the knowledge you need is available on the internet, just with a lot of web searches and detailed reading. If you can get smart about that particular type of gun, you can turn that to your advantage and you can make a handsome profit even in a market that's stagnant.

In a rising market, you can make a tremendous amount of money. I have a lot of buddies who have very nicely filled safes and they affectionately refer to them as their retirement plan. I always doubted the authority of that statement simply because it's a rare gun collector that I've met who keeps detailed records.

I've never had a great deal of insight as to the actual appreciation and the value of the gun market. Two part question. One, what's been the long term rate of return of firearms if we were just to pretend it's an asset class? Two, do you have any sense whether you have detailed records or just a general sense, do you have any sense of your own personal investment rate of return of your investing activities with regard to firearms?

Sure. I think we can safely say that guns as a whole have matched inflation. High grade guns and guns with particular collector appeal have far surpassed the rate of inflation. They haven't kept up with the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the S&P in terms of decade in, decade out.

But it's still as an asset class a very good investment. You're hardly ever going to lose money unless you do stupid things like store your firearms improperly, say you live in a humid climate and you don't oil your firearms and you don't leave them in a climate controlled gun vault.

You want to invest in what's called a golden rod. It's an electric dehumidifier that sits in the bottom of your gun vault. As long as you don't store your guns improperly, you're basically never going to lose money on guns. And if you buy the right guns, you have the potential to make a very handsome profit.

I think my own rate of return has been above average because I've gone pretty heavily into what are commonly called black rifles which are essentially paramilitary semi-automatic firearms. They're guns that basically look like modern battle rifles but they're not capable of fully automatic fire. They're only semi-automatic. And by buying guns from makers like FN, from Valmet, from IWI, they're the makers of the Tavor in Israel.

Well, actually, they're assembled here in the States. The parts come from Israel. By buying particular models, my rate of return has probably averaged around 12 to 15% per year. And I've always been the type that's constantly improving my collection. And although my collection has gotten considerably larger in recent years, I've mainly just been upgrading my collection with each trade that I make.

And by doing so, the net worth that I have in those gun vaults, and I use that term in the plural, I have several, has gone up substantially. What I love about your guess or estimate of 12 to 15% rate of return is it demonstrates a practical way to approach preparedness.

One of the dangers that I observe of people who become concerned about catastrophic events, whether it be economic collapse or various other events which could lead to global unrest and the end of the world as we know it, as it's affectionately called in prepper circles, it's easy to perhaps go overboard and only assume catastrophe.

And if your plans only assume a catastrophe or collapse of some sort, then perhaps you might not be able to enjoy the benefit of just the good life if things continue just about as they have for the last few decades. And so if you've been able to achieve a nice financial return, not only do you have a well-armored household which has tremendous benefit if there is some sort of scenarios which involve the end of the world as we know it, but if that doesn't occur, then you've achieved a nice investment rate of return and you've had an enjoyable hobby.

It gives you something to do with your children, you get to go to gun shows, and that's something that I would assume you enjoy. So it's a good illustration of managing both sides of the risk. Yes, and I think that is a very well-reasoned approach. And I do recommend that people don't go overboard.

I often see with preppers, in particular, people who come from the medical profession tend to weigh overdue on medical preps. And people who come from a firefighting background tend to weigh overdue on firefighting. And people who are gun hobbyists tend to actually overdo on firearms themselves even to the detriment of not being able to provide enough food storage for their family.

So I believe in well-balanced preparations. And if you buy quality tools, and I consider guns to be nothing more than a tool. There's nothing magical about guns, although they do have a certain cachet. It's a tool. And if you buy a quality tool, it's something that will last not just your own lifetime but into the lifetime of your grandchildren.

Right now, I'm in the process of diversifying my own collection and pushing into stainless steel bolt-action rifles. In part as a hedge in the event that we end up with a future ban on semi-automatic rifles. I'm hedging pretty heavily right now into modern black-stocked stainless steel rifles made by Ruger, Winchester, and Remington.

And I don't think I can go too far wrong with that because that's going to at least match the rate of inflation and because they're stainless steel, they're guns that are literally last four or five generations, maybe 10 generations. You know, right now, it's a rarity to find a firearm with a nice bore that's 300 years old, especially because black powder was used in those days.

But just the age of the steel and given the vagaries of maintenance by various family members, someone occasionally is going to leave a gun wet after firing it and it's going to end up with a rusty bore and then that means it's going to have a pitted bore. But if you're starting out with stainless steel firearms, it's kind of hard to mess up.

So I'm actually pushing in that direction quite a bit. And one of the other reasons I'm pushing towards stainless steel firearms right now is because there are now a number of exotic coatings available. One is called Cerakote, it's C-E-R-A-K-O-T-E, that are available to go over the top of stainless steel.

If you don't like the reflective surface of stainless steel, you can just simply have it Cerakoted. There's also a dazzling number of camouflage patterns that are available to be applied to any gun, including stainless steel guns, through what's called a hydro dipping process. It's essentially like a decal that goes over the top of the finish of the gun.

They dip the rifle in a bath and it looks almost like magic when they come up there and camouflage coated from end to end. And that finish can be peeled off and removed at a later date if need be. But that provides a wonderfully protective finish for the gun and it will, of course, if you can get a nice subdued color or a camouflage pattern, it will cover up the shiny reflective surface of stainless steel.

So I think with those finishes now available, stainless steel rifles are definitely the way to go. Jim, you're a big advocate of not only purchasing the firearms themselves, but also purchasing the appropriate accessories, replacement parts, magazines, etc. And I remember when I bought my first Glock, I went out and I didn't just stick with what did they come with, three magazines, I believe.

I didn't just stick with the three that came with it. I went out and purchased more. And in retrospect, I wish I'd purchased more of the 33 round magazines when they were more widely available. How do you balance that access there, especially from a financial perspective? I understand from a prepper's perspective, you want to have lots of magazines in case you need to use the firearms for a defensive purpose.

But from an investment perspective, how do you balance choosing to buy more firearms or choosing to buy more accessories? Because I think a strong case could be made, especially if one is predicting the end of the world as we know it, a strong case could be made that it's actually the magazines and the accessories which could be more valuable than the firearm itself.

Right. For barter purposes, there would be nothing like having a shoebox full of Glock magazines of various calibers and capacities in a disaster situation. There may come a day where people will just scoff at the idea of trading you silver or gold coins for food. But boy, they will certainly be lining up to buy Glock magazines.

And you're only 30, so you don't probably remember the gun ban of 1994 to 2004 very well. But during that 10-year period, a Glock magazine went from $19 a piece to $80 a piece by the time the ban ended. Thankfully, that ban had a 10-year sunset clause and it was canceled out at the end of 10 years.

Otherwise, we'd still be stuck with it. And if we were, Glock magazines would probably be going for $200 or $300 a piece right now, just for a standard 13-round or 15-round Glock magazine. And we're talking about a piece of plastic here. When governments get involved and they artificially influence the free market, all manner of chaos results.

And with things like firearms magazines, that's an area where politicians could get involved, where prices could go radically higher, and where even a small investment could reap a reward of anywhere from 100% to as much as 2,000% if a ban goes into effect, especially if it's a ban without a sunset clause.

You are also an advocate of accumulating appropriate amounts of ammunition. I want to ask you about something. I've just always wanted to ask you this. You've been an advocate in the past of buying lots of .22 long rifle ammunition. You affectionately refer to it as ballistic wampum, and in your novels, you talk about it being used as a point of barter.

I never bought that theory of yours. I thought, "Okay, that's very cute. Jim has this nice little turn of phrase. It's very nice," until, what was it, a few years ago. And you went to buy boxes of .22 long rifle, and even .22 long rifle was unavailable. So talk about— Jim Collison: Right.

It's so hard to find. Steve: Yeah, so talk about the same market in ammunition and my kind of part-beeb, selfish question. Is there any historical evidence for your affection for .22 long rifle, or is that just something that you— Jim Collison: No, it's just simply because it's ubiquitous. It's used by so many different rifles and pistols, and it's a very common caliber.

.22 long rifle and, to a lesser extent, .22 magnum are very widely used. And because there's such a huge installed base, as it were, there's always going to be a demand for that ammunition. And from a barter standpoint, I can't think of anything better in a disaster with which to be able to barter, because not only is it very durable—if you keep ammunition in a sealed can, it'll last for generations—but one of the other key attributes of any good barter item is that it's divisible, what they refer to as a fungible asset.

And the divisibility of .22 long rifle in particular is tremendous, because it comes 50 or 100 or in a bulk pack as much as 800 rounds per box. That's potentially—a box of 50 .22 cartridges is potentially 50 separate barter transactions for small items of food, for example. You might be able to trade three or four .22 cartridges for a can of beans in a real disaster.

So it really does make an ideal barter currency. I stocked up on it pretty heavily, and it was just kind of my dumb luck that I happened to notice a sale about, what was it, six or seven years ago. There was a big sale from Sportsman's Guide, which is one of the large mail order catalogs.

And apparently they'd had trouble selling some bulk-packed ammunition made by the Federal Cartridge Company. For years, Federal Cartridge Company had a bulk pack of 550 rounds of .22 long rifle ammo. And about six or seven years ago, they switched to a 350-round bulk pack, and they didn't sell as well, because people felt somehow they were getting cheated, even though the per-cartridge cost was about the same, because they'd changed the quantity of the bulk pack.

So those bulk packs of 350 rounds went on sale by mail order by Sportsman's Guide for $16 for a bulk pack of 350 cartridges. Whoa. I saw that as a bargain, because they had been selling the 550-round bulk packs for around $16. So I thought, "Well, I'm getting a lot here." So a buddy of mine and I split a large order, and between the two of us, I think we gave the UPS driver back strain.

We bought, I believe it was somewhere around 30,000 rounds of .22 long rifle at that price. Only a year later, the crisis that you described came up, where a shortage of ammunition started with the battle rifle cartridges, but then just kind of as an after effect, people thought, "Oh, I should buy some .22 as well." Well, did they ever.

And you still can't reliably find .22 long rifle cartridges. And those same bulk packs of .22 cartridges, again, they were 350 rounds per box, they were made by Federal Cartridge Company, now sell for between $50 and $70 per carton, per bulk pack. And I can't think of any other investment that I've made that's had near the same level of return on investment as that particular bulk purchase of .22 long rifle ammo.

It turned out to be just kind of serendipity, but boy, I'm not regretting it at all. So as an investor, have you sold most of it to reap your profit? Actually, I've sold back into the market about half of it, and I've done quite well with it. But what I'm replacing it with is actually battle rifle ammunition.

I'm now buying .223 and .308 ammo in quantity with the proceeds from that in anticipation of a new shortage in the future of those battle rifle cartridges. It's meant that I've had to buy a lot more ammo cans because that ammo is not quite as compact as .22 long rifle per cartridge.

But I think that in the long run, that strategy should pay off well for me. What would be your advice? Pretend there's a listener who is just listening to this show out of interest, and most of the world does not have – here in the United States, a lot of us have lots of guns.

But much of the world doesn't have – firearm ownership is not nearly as widespread as it is, and there are still many people in the United States who don't own any firearms. What would be your advice as far as a reasonable and thoughtful, rational way for a neophyte firearms buyer to approach building up their own collection?

Well, it all depends on whether or not you're survival-minded. If you anticipate a socioeconomic collapse, then you would need a battery of firearms that would be appropriate to defend a family and to put food on the table of a family through hunting and through slaughtering your own livestock. And there I would recommend that you have one battle rifle for each adult member of the family, one modern combat high-capacity pistol in a man-stopping caliber, so that would be at least a 9mm, preferably a 40 Smith & Wesson or a 45 automatic for each adult member of the family, and then one .22 rifle for each member of the family, adults and children, and my favorite right now for that is the Ruger 10/22 stainless steel takedown.

It's one that can be disassembled into two pieces so it'll fit in a backpack. And then one shotgun that could double as both a combat shotgun and as a bird hunting shotgun for each adult member of the family, and perhaps one long-range counter-sniper rifle. Here I'm talking about a scoped bolt-action rifle chambered in .308 or .30-06 preferably that would be capable of taking down a man-sized target out to 1,200 yards.

You should have one of those at least for the family, preferably one for each adult member of the family. Now if your main concern is just investing and you're not anticipating any kind of societal disruption, then perhaps you're better off investing all in pre-1899 firearms because they're the, like for example Colts, a Colt single-action revolver that you would have paid $30 or $40 for in the 1960s is now selling for $6,000, $7,000, $8,000.

It's just a matter of finding a make and model of gun that's of very high quality, that's sought after by collectors, and that's going to appreciate in value. What about, final couple of questions and we're done. Obviously with firearms, many of my listeners will be in living situations that make it perhaps more difficult to accumulate a collection, whether it's simply trundling ammo cans filled with ammunition up to the 30th floor of an apartment, that can be a little bit taxing, or simply coming and going with long rifle cases every day in many of our neighborhoods can raise some eyebrows.

Do you have any advice for people who are concerned about theft? Certainly I would say, I would lean toward collecting handguns, but there's a lot to be said for using musical instrument cases. My favorites are guitar cases and trombone cases, or for example I just mentioned takedown rifles. You can fit a takedown .22 or a takedown combat shotgun or riot shotgun in a trumpet case and to the untrained eye, unless you're wearing an NRA hat and carrying it around, it's just going to look like you're a musician.

You might want to lean more toward handguns if you're an urbanite and you're looking to invest in guns and you're worried about the high profile of carrying gun cases around. Musical instrument cases or Casio keyboard cases for example can cover all manner of investments. I won't say sins, I'll say investments.

Why is gun collecting so addictive? I think part of it is the historical attachment that comes along with a lot of firearms. When you pick up a Winchester rifle that has brass tacks pounded into it by some Native American from the 1850s and 1860s, you're literally holding a piece of history in your hands.

I often hear the phrase at gun shows, "If this gun could only speak about where it was." The same applies to military guns. You say you have a Model 98 Mauser that was made in 1917. Most of that gun probably was in the trenches of World War I or you say you have an M1 Garand that is in a serial number that dates it before 1945.

Chances are probably 99% that gun was actually carried by a combat infantryman in World War II in either the European or the Pacific theater of operations. So you're literally investing in history and everyone really knows that when they see these particular makes and models of guns in particular serial number ranges.

For example, there's a whole bunch of people who collect nothing but trapdoor Springfield carbines in what was called the Custer era. This is a single shot 45-70 carbine that was carried by cavalrymen and if you buy them in a particular serial number range, you're buying them before the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876.

You're literally buying a gun that could have been carried by a cavalry trooper in the Custer era. So for guns like that, there's a particular significance that's historical and I see the same thing go on with Japanese swords where just by seeing a particular maker's mark on the tang of a Japanese sword, you know that it's from the whatever era from like 1600 or whatever and it could have been carried in whatever Japanese Civil War.

Those kind of things are going to be known by astute collectors and they will always put not just a premium but a multiplier on the value of that particular item versus one that's just as well made but in a different serial number range. Aaron Ross Powell: Jim, this has been awesome.

Survivalblog.com is your website, probably if not the largest, one of the largest survival oriented websites. Tell my audience about your newest novel. Jim Gildey, PhD Oh sure. My latest novel is called Land of Promise. It's about the establishment of a libertarian Christian homeland nation following the establishment of a global Islamic caliphate.

It's set in the future. I hope your listeners enjoy reading it. But folks, please do take a look at survivalblog.com. If you go to my bookshelf and video page, you'll find a lot of references on investing in not just firearms but also things like coins for example. And everything that is at survivalblog.com is free of charge.

There is no super secret members only area. It's all free. All the archives are fully searchable. So please folks, take full advantage of it. Aaron Ross Powell, thank you so much, Joshua. Thank you for listening to this episode of Radical Personal Finance. If you're interested in building financial freedom for yourself and your family, please subscribe to the podcast with our free mobile app so you don't miss a single episode.

Just search the app store on your mobile device for Radical Personal Finance and download our free app which also contains an archive of every past episode of the show. If you have received value and financial benefit from the content of today's show, please consider becoming a supporting patron. Radical Personal Finance is listener supported and it's your direct financial support which enables me to bring you this content.

In addition to your voluntarily paying for the content you've just heard, as a supporting patron you will receive a number of member only benefits including a private Facebook group, access to our weekly Q&A calls and discounts on future products and services. Details can be found at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. Again, RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron.