Master Inflation: Proven Wealth Preservation Techniques with Gold & Silver

John Harcar (00:01.098)
All right. Hey guys, welcome back to our show. I’m your host, John Harcar, and I’m here today with Ben Rusk. And what we’re going to talk about besides his journey, we’re going to talk a little bit more about owning gold and silver and protecting your retirement. Guys, remember at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, all real estate entrepreneurs, two to five extra business. And we help do that by delivering the tools and resources to build the business they want to build.

which gives them the ability to live that life they’ve always dreamed of. So Ben, welcome to our show.

Ben Rusk (00:34.21)
Well, thank you. Glad to be here.

John Harcar (00:36.108)
Yeah, man. Appreciate you coming on. Appreciate you taking the time to share your knowledge with us. But before, you know, we get into all that, let’s just kind of give folks a little bit of background on you. You know, what kind of brought you to where you are today?

Ben Rusk (00:48.846)
Alright, so I started out in 1986. entered the IT industry and for 35 years I was…

35 years I was contributing money to a 401k. And over that time I watched the markets and the markets were going up, going down. And I didn’t really know and understand how to manage my 401k. So I just did what everybody did. You just keep adding money and you just let it ride. You know, the promise was we were going to get to retirement age. We were going to have this big nest egg of money. Well, I arrived. I finally achieved that retirement age. And when I looked back, I was like, wow.

You know, this money, while it should have been growing, I thought exponentially, the dips were a real eye-opener for me. And, you know, back in the day, I collected gold and silver in small amounts, and I really didn’t do it steadily and consistently, right? And I started comparing what if I had done that steady and consistency in gold and silver versus

John Harcar (01:51.456)
Right. Right.

Ben Rusk (02:00.972)
my 401k, where would I have been? And the difference was astonishing. So when I retired, I had to find a way to protect that 35 years of life savings. And so I went looking for an option and I stumbled across gold and silver. Now, I know that sounds weird because I’ve been a gold prospector for over 25 years.

John Harcar (02:15.489)
Mm-hmm.

Ben Rusk (02:30.124)
Literally going out into the hills and digging it up out of the ground. All right. So you would say I would be a little more in tuned with the two ends of the spectrum, right? The one that digging the resource out of the ground and the other side using it as an investment tool to grow my wealth. And the two circuits never connected for me until I reached retirement age. And I’m like, wow, how did I miss this? And that’s what I’m here today to help with.

John Harcar (02:41.216)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (02:48.459)
Right.

Ben Rusk (03:00.216)
explain to your audience that they need to take a look at what they’re doing to actually preserve their wealth, you know, their life savings.

John Harcar (03:08.435)
Awesome. Okay, well before we get into that, let’s kind of go back. So let’s talk about this gold prospecting thing because you know, mean, I know Gold Rush. I love that TV show. Did you do it to that? Did you do it? It’s probably like, I was thinking, you know, people who actually are doing that, doing gold prospecting are probably like, man, that show’s so fake or whatever. Tell me about your adventures or like, you know, the best find you had or how were you out there prospecting? you just with a pan?

Ben Rusk (03:17.39)
I’ve everything.

Ben Rusk (03:36.14)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the best find, I would tell this to everybody, the best find is your first find. Because when you put dirt in a pan, you shake it around in the water, there’s a certain technique to it you gotta learn, but when you actually see the gold in the pan for the first time, and people talk about getting the gold bug, gold fever, it’s like it is absolutely true.

John Harcar (04:00.907)
Yeah.

How funny.

Ben Rusk (04:04.884)
It nails you like, this cannot be that easy. But I’ll tell you what, that day sparked something in me that it said, be bold, go out and do what you wanna do, because if you know how to pull money out of the ground, you’ll never be broke a day in your life.

John Harcar (04:22.177)
There you go. So how did you find the areas to go gold mine?

Ben Rusk (04:26.03)
Um, so that’s, you know, that’s an interesting thing. I started in Helena, Montana. Like a friend of mine invited me to go panning one day and I said, sure. You know, like I’ve been trying for years, right? And I’d never really found anything, found a lot of black sand, but never found gold. So he took me and we went down, we lifted a rock. We brushed off the rock, like into a dust pan and put it into the, into the pan and went down to the river and, and, and found gold right away. And then, so.

John Harcar (04:28.191)
or prospect.

Ben Rusk (04:55.84)
learning why gold comes to rest in a certain spot. It was a sliver cracking a rock and the river, when it gets high, pushes gold down the river and it gets wedged into these cracks. So when you lift that up and just brush it off, it’s all just sitting right there. So it’s same thing with understanding in the rivers. So inside bend of a river is where the heavies tend to fall. That’s why you get that big buildup of sand on one side and the

John Harcar (05:13.441)
Incredible.

Ben Rusk (05:24.962)
and the river’s rushing on the other side, of curving out the wall, or carving, carving out the wall. So once you learn how the mechanics of gold going down a river works and where it comes from, the whole process of prospecting is panning in a river until you no longer find any gold. And the reason for that is you back up a couple feet and you start going up the hill.

John Harcar (05:27.296)
Right.

John Harcar (05:52.203)
Mm-hmm.

Ben Rusk (05:52.27)
because up the hill is where the erosion is breaking off from the gold vein, rolling down the hill into the river and then downstream. So that’s how you find a gold vein is you work your way up the river until you stop finding gold and then you go up the hill. That’s where your mother loads going to be.

John Harcar (06:01.183)
Incredible.

John Harcar (06:10.475)
That’s awesome. What’s the most you ever found like in one trip?

Ben Rusk (06:14.638)
You know, people need to understand you’ve seen gold rush, right? And it’s all super small stuff, right? So the point is, is you never find a lot at any one time. You know, maybe like 31 grams, there’s 31 grams in an ounce. If you go out and find 10 grams, you’re having a great day. Okay, so it just gives you an idea, you know, today,

John Harcar (06:19.134)
Of course.

John Harcar (06:39.551)
Yeah. Okay.

Ben Rusk (06:44.366)
10 grams would be worth almost $1,000.

John Harcar (06:48.961)
Right. it goes it goes like 2500 bucks or how much is it 3000 now?

Ben Rusk (06:49.902)
It’s gold $3,000. So I just looked it up before the show. The spot price on gold is $3,327. Yeah.

John Harcar (07:01.627)
Incredible. All right, so.

All these folks, kind of like you mentioned, are in what everybody’s been told to do, just put it in your 401k, put it in your 401k, put it in your 401k.

What are the things that they should be looking for when they want to move that money out? Now you I know gold is your thing. So what kind of situations is there any like, you know, prerequisite where they should it should be x, y, z amount of years before they put pull it out? I mean, give me me in on that part.

Ben Rusk (07:33.39)
So again, not being a financial advisor, I will just tell you what I did, right? So I used to buy gold way back in the eighties, $295 an ounce, right? And it was like, I should have been doing that every week, right? So instead of putting it into 401k and watching it go up, go down, go up, go down, if you’re stacking those coins, imagine stacking one of these a week, a month, a year, whatever it is.

John Harcar (07:37.473)
Sure. Right.

Ben Rusk (08:01.848)
But if you stack it consistently and the value goes up, all of a sudden this little pile of metal also becomes an emergency fund. It becomes your personal bank, right? And it’s like, are you going to put it in a 401k where you’re paying commissions to somebody else on the money that you’re working for right now? And I just found that appalling actually. You know, I worked 35 years to develop a principle.

I then hand it to somebody and ask them to make a profit and they take commissions on both the principal and the profit. Well, they didn’t work for the principal, so why are you taking a commission on it? So the more of our money that we can be holding in our hand and managing our own wealth and decide when do we need to liquidate it, that’s our decision. And as long as it’s sitting here on our shelf, we don’t have to pay any commissions, taxes or anything else on it. It’s just.

John Harcar (08:38.431)
bright.

John Harcar (08:41.985)
That’s true.

John Harcar (08:59.446)
Right.

Ben Rusk (09:00.024)
It’s just a commodity sitting there. And people think about, well, how much money am I gonna spend to get an ounce of silver? And it’s like, you’re not spending money. You still have purchasing power, whether it’s the dollar bill or an ounce of silver, it’s still purchasing power. So don’t think of it as spending money. Think of it as investing in something that’s gonna hold its value, which it has held its value for over 5,000 years, right? People have been using gold and silver.

John Harcar (09:13.973)
You’re just swapping.

John Harcar (09:28.15)
Right.

Ben Rusk (09:30.09)
as a hedge against inflation, as a store of wealth for many decades. And so what we want people to understand is that what if you could just put a majority of your money into gold and silver and liquidate it when you need to? Then you’re not paying commissions, you’re not paying banking fees and all this other stuff. You’re holding your own wealth.

John Harcar (09:55.498)
Right.

Ben Rusk (09:58.06)
and you’re only liquidating it in times of emergencies or needs, right?

John Harcar (10:02.977)
Do you think it’s a true lack of it, just education, why not many more people are doing it?

Ben Rusk (10:07.95)
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely, and that’s why I’m here today. I am trying to reach as many people as I can to help them get their life savings secured and understand how to manage your wealth with gold and silver. You we all know how to manage our wealth with dollar bills and credit cards, right? We just, we use one and pay it off with the other back and forth while all the time we’re sitting our money in the bank. The bank is us 5%.

a year interest. They’re using that money and making what? You get a loan, you’re paying what? 18, 20 %? So that’s what the bank is making on our money. And with the rise in inflation being 12%, that means we’re losing 7 % a year by leaving our money in the bank and they’re making money off of our money. If we get our money into gold and silver, now we’re in charge of our wealth.

John Harcar (11:02.944)
Right.

Ben Rusk (11:06.796)
riding the markets, right? Why does gold go up in value? Because inflation went up. So the saying I try to remind people is gold will always buy what gold has always bought. If inflation goes up, the price of goods goes up, can price a gold goes up, I can buy whatever I wanna buy because it’s floating at the same inflation rate as the goods and services. That’s why gold is so high today.

John Harcar (11:33.385)
Right, okay.

Got it. So what education is out there for folks? you know, besides yourself, I mean, what education or what steps should people start reading up on? Where should they look up, you know, information on, you know, why gold?

Ben Rusk (11:49.292)
Yep, so a good place to start would be the Constitution and understand what the Constitution says about gold and silver is that it is the currency of the land, everything else is credit. So gold and silver has been defined, but there are things that you need to learn about the different shapes of gold and silver. There are very specific words that make buying very specific forms of gold and silver more lucrative, okay?

John Harcar (12:18.549)
What do mean shapes of gold and silver?

Ben Rusk (12:21.09)
Well, you can buy a silver eagle or a gold eagle. That’s what these are. You can buy a hundred ounce silver bar or one ounce gold bar. It’s an ingot, right? So there’s verbiage in the constitution that differentiates depending on what shape gold and silver is in. All right.

John Harcar (12:29.653)
Okay.

John Harcar (12:45.754)
Hmm, okay. Does the shape affect the value?

Ben Rusk (12:50.338)
Not the value, the liability. We’re talking capital gains and the like. All right, so that’s the kinds of things that people need to get educated on. You know, why do the wealthy invest in five major things, right? We all know exclusive real estate, fine art, rare coins, gold and other usable precious metals. Because there’s language in the law of the land that…

John Harcar (12:52.033)
Okay. Hmm.

John Harcar (12:59.178)
Okay.

John Harcar (13:09.609)
Yep. Yep. Yep.

Ben Rusk (13:18.306)
helps protect them while invested in those items. Okay, so these are the things I want people to start waking up to and understanding. And this education, we make this education available. So you don’t have to look far and you don’t have to spend a fortune going to college, learning about gold and silver. We can help out in those areas for the people that wanna take the next step. If this is making sense to people.

John Harcar (13:22.113)
Okay.

Ben Rusk (13:46.39)
and they want to they want to dig deeper, then that’s why I’m here to get in touch with folks and help them to understand where we’re going.

John Harcar (13:55.468)
So what happens when the goal drops?

Ben Rusk (13:59.886)
If the price of gold drops, means inflation has come down, which means the price of goods and services have come down. So gold will still buy what gold has always bought. An example I give people just to help them get a picture in their head. Back in the day, a Roman soldier could outfit himself for the day. We’re talking sandals, clothing, a belt, a sword, a helmet. That’s what this gold would have bought back in the day.

John Harcar (14:06.934)
KK.

But, right.

Ben Rusk (14:30.008)
Today, take this gold at the price it is today, $3,327. Do you think a top end CEO executive could outfit himself for the day with the price of gold? A suitcase, a suit, shoes, leather belt, a cell phone, you know, that’s what it would cost him to outfit himself for the day. That’s Roman Soldier to CEO. That’s what I’m trying to.

paint the picture that gold will always buy what gold has always bought.

John Harcar (15:04.639)
Why is it important now? Because I’ve heard a lot more push about gold and silver and whatnot. Why is it so important now in today’s world?

Ben Rusk (15:14.926)
My belief is that countries are starting to understand what’s happening in the global economy. There’s a term called repatriation. It’s hard to say it. Repatriating your gold and silver back to within the borders of the country, right? They used to leave it on the COMEX, right? The Commodities Exchange. There were ballots and ballots had a name like Australia, London.

You know, Africa, you know, these countries are saying, nah, we want to take possession. So the gold and silver is coming back to the countries. And there are charts out there that will show you that over the last three, four months, all the gold coming out of Switzerland has been coming to the United States. Why? Well, we believe it’s because somebody with very deep pockets is trying to accumulate a whole bunch of gold for a particular reason. Might that be to resupply Fort Knox? We don’t know.

but we can see the direction the gold is moving. All right, so for some reason, all other countries are being denied and all the gold is coming to the US right now. And that’ll be interesting to find out why that happened. And I’m sure at some point we’ll know. But in the meantime, because that deep pocket is sucking up the world’s supply, everybody else is on hold. So they’re trying to find other ways to buy gold. So they’re siphoning it out of the market, right? Think about it.

John Harcar (16:35.516)
Mm-hmm.

Ben Rusk (16:42.21)
Let’s just say there’s 10 ounces and nine countries want it and they all can only get one ounce. Well, sooner or later, people that are holding gold and silver will have to, they’ll have to raise the price high enough so that people that are holding will release it. Right? And so that’s what’s going on right now is that they’re drying up the market. Supply is drying up. Demand will have to increase. And that’s why we’re

John Harcar (16:59.883)
Yeah, I got it. That makes sense.

Ben Rusk (17:11.723)
hoping people understand that silver’s been undervalued for a long time, like since 1971.

John Harcar (17:20.033)
Wow, okay. So what kind of, no, I’m sorry, go ahead.

Ben Rusk (17:21.485)
In 1970s…

I was gonna say in 1971, when we came off the gold standard, the gold to silver ratio was 16 to one. $32 for an ounce of gold, $2 for an ounce of silver. That was 16 to one. At 33.27 today, that would put a silver value at 207 if we were to return to a 16 to one ratio.

Silver is undervalued today at $44 an ounce when it should be $207.

John Harcar (18:01.313)
So what help can you give our audience? Like what direction can you point them in or how can they get in touch with you to really find out more about this stuff?

Ben Rusk (18:12.782)
So I can share my phone number my website and I can tell them that we have Yeah, so my phone number is two five three two four eight four thousand Hopefully that’s easy to remember my website is silver gold legacy comm and What we do is we have that we have a membership that helps to educate people. It’s a hundred and forty nine dollars for what it’s a one-time fee

John Harcar (18:16.501)
Yeah, whatever you’d like.

Ben Rusk (18:39.278)
You’re gonna get access to platforms that allow you to buy gold and silver 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Our market’s never closed. We have no minimum or maximum purchases. And the education that we provide is the education that I’ve been talking about. We’ll give you a college level briefing of the education you need to be the smartest person in the room when negotiating a purchase or sale of gold or silver.

John Harcar (19:09.953)
Awesome. Perfect. guys, mean, I hope you took a lot of information from this. You know, like I said, in a lot of my podcasts, this is something that’s come up in different times about reinvesting into the the metals. Ben, I appreciate you coming on here and sharing all this. And you guys, I hope you had a good show. I know I did. And we’ll look forward to seeing you guys on the next one. Cheers.