Gold: protect your heritage.

Judging by my past posts, when Dashain is around the corner, I get the itch to blog, so here I go again!

"Eye spy, with my little eye, something beginning with G."

In the Nepali world, it seems most men know very little about gold before he is married, except being an expensive metal. And particularly if their partner is Nepali or South Asian in origin, they find out just how much their partner 'loves' jewellery, but there is more to it than that. I haven't owned or wore a single piece of jewellery until I was twenty-four (maybe I have no class, some may say) when I passed my masters degree. I tried it on, but didn't feel the appeal and left it with my parents. Six years later, even right now as I type this, I'm wearing no jewellery, not even my wedding ring - mainly out of fear of losing it as I seem to have become skinner in the last few years! But that's my choice, no disrespect to you if you wish to bling yourself out.

"I pity the fool"

So what have I learnt about gold since getting hitched? Many things. Firstly no matter how much you detest a woman's admiration for jewellery, the 'worship' of gold has a deep cultural significance in peoples from South, Central, East Asian heritage. From the worship to the goddess of wealth, Lakshmi in Hindu culture, 'golden skin' of Buddha in Buddhism to the use of gold as a 'protection' in the absence of a husband, gold symbolises more than the face value of gold itself. That I can appreciate, and often the gold is inherited, and so carries sentimental value. However, recently,  I've started to question folks (not literally but in my thoughts) that are routinely buying gold and/or 'hoarding' on to it. Though I think there is nothing wrong with it, as some spend their money on diamonds, shares, artwork, whatever, I worry about how safe people keep these valuable items.

Before I go on, if people think I shouldn't be here raising attention to jewellery held by Nepali's and other communities, then sorry I just did. In fact, it's not exactly a secret either. Under our noses, I know people personally who have had their house's robbed and left devastated with their loss. Criminals are getting smarter with gold metal detectors and know what communities are hoarding expensive items. But at the same time, home owners are not being very savvy in looking after their precious items. Since the recession, particularly this year, there have been a spate of robberies which you can read here, here and here, and there are no signs of successful robberies going down. But what can you do about surviving a robbery if it happens to you?

To begin, ask yourself:

- If your gold disappeared the next day without your knowledge, how would you feel?

-  Could you afford to replace the monetary/sentimental value?

-  Can you prove you own the jewellery, if say the police or your insurance asked?

If some of those questions, make you feel uneasy, then maybe it's time to think how to protect your jewellery? (I just realised I'm talking like an insurance salesman, this is weird as I hate sales people, difference is I'm not taking your money and it's honestly for your own good :-). There are FREE (yes, free) things you can do to make those robbers life a misery.

1) Don't put all your jewellery in a single cupboard or at the bottom of a chest of drawers. I know it's convenient but you're just asking for it. The items you don't wear that often, maybe their better placed way out of reach. Spread them around a bit, waste these f*cking robbers their robbing time.

2) Related to the above, think about places where people wouldn't normally go, perhaps a loft? A hidden safe? Even if you have hidden it well out of reach, if a robber has a detector and found your jewellery, how hard would it be to access and walk out of the house? Test your idea with a close one or someone you trust.

3) Check the strength of your door and windows. Lots of houses get robbed this way because people forget to shut windows. If you have double glazing, some have in locks them. Lock them when you go out. If you rent, ask your landlord about obvious faults. It's your right to have them fixed. See here.

3) Keep all your receipts for your gold jewellery in one place. If you don't have receipts, as jewellery might be gifts or were bought aboard, take photos of ALL your jewellery. Keep all receipts and photos somewhere safe, a locked cabinet file would be ideal. For the extra paranoid, photocopy all your receipts and photos and keep a copy at another property you trust. After all, if your house gets robbed, anything could happen. Pressure cookers can be made into bombs these days, you know?

4) Get your jewellery valued. Ok this one is unfair, I'm making you spend money, but if you bought your jewellery items some time ago, have you ever wondered how much your gold jewellery is worth now? Have a look at the rise in gold price in the last twenty years, it is worth thinking about.  Let's say you bought 11g of gold in 2002, looking at the charge, that would have cost you £6 x 11 = £66. In 2012, with the gold price floating around £35 per gram, that same 11g of gold is now worth £35 x 11 = £361. That's about six times as much you paid for it in 2002.

Gold Price between 1992 - 2012 - not a bad investment in 2005.

Also, your home insurance will pay you if the inevitable happens, and you'll definitely get back what they're worth today, than what you paid, 5, 10 or 20 years ago. I would recommend doing this also if you don't have receipts and want some piece of mind on the gold purity. As a guide a decent jeweller would charge 0.5%-1% per item. So indirectly I'm saving you a lot of money and giving you peace of mind!

5) Check, double check and triple check you ACTUALLY have home insurance and if you do check that they can insure high value items. So many times I hear people's stuff getting stolen for them to later realise they didn't have insurance or their insurance didn't cover the items involved in the theft. For a lot of insurance providers, you have to declare items more than £1500, but there are some (such as Endsleigh) where you don't have to, just as long the value of the items doesn't exceed the amount of cover you're after. So say you wanted £40,000 worth of cover, and you have something worth £20,000, then in principle they should cover it if that £20,000 item goes missing. Again, check, check, check. For the extra paranoid, check the terms and conditions yourself, and get important things said over the phone in writing to you or get them to point to the relevant paragraph in their small print. If you find these things difficult, find someone with experience who can help. It can be time consuming checking every detail.

If you done those five things, then give yourself a pat on the back. You can be confident that if your possessions go missing, you won't go out of pocket. The next steps involve spending some money and thinking about physical security, especially if you care about the sentimental side of your jewellery. Here are some of my random ideas:

6) Get a house alarm installed. Test it.

7) Get a safe. Test it

8) Get CCTV - personally not a fan of this, unless you live in a mansion. 

9) Get a pet - they can 'feel' like a deterent.

10) Get a Bahadur. Kidding - they should be in school!

Lastly, with whatever mechanisms and ideas you put in place, please don't give any clues to people wouldn't normally trust where your valued possessions are. I kid you not, this is a true story. I know a landlady, who had some students lodging at her house, then one day she went to her private place to manage her gold jewellery. Next day, everything was stolen, twenty-thousands worth to be precise. It was like her life savings she had collected for the past thirty years. Turns out, one of the lodgers saw her go to this secret place, and did the damage when the landlady was out.

Don't let it happen to you!

So, there you go, a sharing some experience of gold, not very glamourous, but for the wider good. I also found out what a 'tola' actually is. People still swear by this measure for gold weight. Seen as I know what a gram is as I used to bake cakes at school, here is a basic conversion to put things in perspective:

1 Nepali tola = 11.66375g

Happy Dashain

Further Reading: www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jan/31/gold-theft-asian-families