A few years ago my family did what a lot of thoughtful people are doing now. We built a plan B. We picked Dubai, got our residency, set up a place to live and a small vault. We were pleased with ourselves. Dubai is a well-run city, and we had done the paperwork properly.
Then the missiles started flying over the Gulf. Our first reaction was the one everyone has: it’ll be fine, I think it’ll be fine. And in our case it largely was. But the lesson was hard to miss. If you put everything into one bolt hole, you are betting that the world won’t change after you get there. And the world always changes.
Where this started for me
When I was born, my grandfather put $1,000 into a mutual fund for me and managed it for sixteen years; by 1987 it had grown to about $10,000. He died in September 1987. A few weeks later, on Monday, October 19th, the market had its worst day in history. When the statement arrived, I was furious: I had lost a thousand dollars in one day. In 1987, to a sixteen-year-old, that was a massive amount of money.
I told my mother that was never going to happen to me again. She laughed. But it started forty years of learning how money actually works, mostly as a customer, sitting in the same seat most people sit in. Along the way I spent twenty-five years as a military physician, built health-IT companies, and have used offshore structures here in Cayman for about twenty years. Gun Bay came out of that experience, and out of a community of people working on the same questions together.
You are probably less diversified than you think
Ask most people whether they’re diversified and they’ll describe a brokerage account: an S&P 500 fund, some tech, some bonds, some cash. In one sense, fair enough. But look at where it all sits. One brokerage means one custodian. One bank means one counterparty, and the money in that bank isn’t legally yours. You are a creditor of the bank. If the bank fails, you find out whose money it really was.
If everything you own lives inside one country’s financial system, with one way to get money in and one way to get it out, that isn’t diversification. It’s concentration with a spread of tickers on top. We think about it differently:
Why real assets, and why now
Currencies rise and fall in long cycles. The Spanish real, the Dutch guilder, the French livre, the British pound and now the U.S. dollar each had their turn as the world’s reference money. Public debt in the major economies is at levels without peacetime precedent. You don’t need to predict the exact date a cycle turns to see that it’s sensible to hold some things that don’t depend on it.
The fall of Rome is a useful case study. As commerce collapsed, people gravitated to landowners who could still produce food, and those estates became the seed of the feudal system. Meanwhile, the empire had been clipping its coins, putting less gold and silver into each one. That is literally where the word “debasement” comes from. When a later emperor restored an honest gold coin, it was trusted and traded for centuries after Rome itself was gone, because people knew what was in it.
So the assets our community focuses on are the ones that tend to hold up when systems strain. These are also the assets we own ourselves:
- Agricultural land that produces food.
- Real estate. When a house “goes up in value,” often it’s the currency going down.
- Energy production, which has historically done well in stagflation.
- Precious metals, the oldest store of value there is.
- Livestock. We are buying a cattle ranch in Argentina. An oil well keeps producing and cattle keep eating grass regardless of what Nvidia does.
A fleet, not a bolt hole
The question isn’t “where do I run to?” It’s “do I have the resources and the routes to go wherever I need to, when I need to?”
One of our members told me recently that Colombia might be her plan B. She has citizenship there but lives here in Cayman, and she didn’t want to buy a house she’d rarely see. Who fixes the burst pipe? Where does she store things? We agreed she didn’t need to put assets there at all. She needed a rail. “I could open a checking account there,” she said. That’s it. A small, cheap step that means that if she ever needs to get money to Colombia, the route already exists.
Multiply that across metals held in more than one vault, accounts in more than one jurisdiction, and positions in assets that don’t move together, and you have a fleet: several ships that can sail in different directions as conditions change, instead of one harbour that you hope stays safe.
If you put everything into one bolt hole, you’re betting that the world won’t change. I think we know it does.
Why we pool it
This is how the very wealthy have always done it. A large family office doesn’t leave its capital in a bank account. It spreads it across private and public investments, metals, land and operating businesses, and it employs lawyers, accountants and managers in several countries to run it all.
Most people can’t afford that. Very few have a tax attorney on retainer in four jurisdictions, and very few can write a $2 million check for a single oil well or know how to buy a herd of cattle. Together, people can. That’s the idea behind Gun Bay: a crowdsourced family office, where members share the lawyers, the accountants, the vault relationships and the expertise, and each takes the piece that fits them.
It sits alongside the Mavericks, the open community where the thinking happens. Members there share what they know about finance, health, education and food, and help each other with real problems. When members in Russia were cut off by their banks, the community helped them work out a route through Georgia so they could keep paying for groceries. And when one member’s bank account was shut down after donating to the Canadian truckers’ protest, it was a reminder that this doesn’t only happen in faraway places.
What you can do on your own
You don’t need to join anything to act on this. Most of it you can start yourself:
- Count your systems, not your tickers. How many banks, custodians, countries and currencies does your wealth actually depend on?
- Open one rail before you need it. A second bank account in another jurisdiction is cheap insurance.
- Hold something real. Even a small allocation to physical metal changes your exposure.
- Size your bets. Keep any single illiquid position small enough that losing it wouldn’t hurt you.
- Find people on the ground. A friend in another country is often a better news source than a news channel.
And if you’d rather not build all of it alone, that’s why we’re here. Come to a meetup, ask the awkward questions, talk to members who have been with us a while, and take your time. You won’t agree with everyone in the room. We’d be worried if you did.