Storing metals at home?

I was shopping for a gun safe at Cabellas a week ago. Expect to pay about $600 for anything substantial enough not to be trashed on site or carried away in a Robbery.

I would only use a safe as a decoy. If it's so big you need help installing it then it's not secret. If it's small enough you can bring it home yourself, it isn't good enough. And a gun pointed at you will open the best of them. Those are the things that roll around in my head.

Best to store just enough in one to satisfy the nefarious in a worst case scenario...

and get creative with negative space for the bulk.

I have a couple of safes, but I don't keep everything in them. The best plan is to keep a chunk in the safe and bury the real stash someplace in the back forty.

Whatever safe you get, be sure to anchor it to keep it from being wheeled off in a burglary. Even better, get two safes. Put one in a corner and anchor it to the floor (para-wedge anchors in a concrete slab are sturdy) and both walls of the corner. Put the second safe next to the first and anchor it. Then bolt the two safes together. Your most valuable possessions go in the corner safe. The only available avenues of attack are the 'door side' (the sturdiest) and from above (the least convenient).

Even a 600 lb. safe can be dollied out of a house pretty easily if not anchored down.

Sentry safes? Yep! With a drill and a jig saw I had one (of my own) emptied in less than five minutes.

These are apparently the top end in safes - maybe double in price - but maybe they are worth it . Everyone has unique circumstances and have to decide based on that - not what someone else thinks. I do like having several safes - none of them obvious, with at least one or two well hidden. Keep your eggs in many baskets - including the "back forty" as some one suggested. I also like to have some lead handy - if you get my drift . good luck...

I use a small cheap key safe you can buy at any home depot or wal-mart and hide it really well.

As others have said, it is tough to disguise a safe. That said, they do have their uses as most are sold with some level of fire protection as well as some resistance to forced entry. Also keep in mind that unless you are a retiree and in the last house you ever plan to live in that you will have to move that beast eventually. If it's heavier than you and your buddies can move safely, you'll have to pay someone to haul it every time you move. All the best.

A big guard dog and a safe, thats been my recipe.....you could kill the dog, and steal the safe i guess. But its probably easier to hit the next house, right? Also, on the safe topic, its good to have to store birth certificates, stock certificates, blah blah blah....i keep a hard drive with all the family pics on it in there as well, in case of fire. its never a bad idea to have a good safe. one fools opinion. 

a safe with a flat bottom can be glued to a concrete slab with "liquid nails," super glue, etc. also good to glue it to other heavy items - concrete walls, other safes, whatever's handy and heavy. if you are experienced with concrete and steel, you can do a really good job with a few bags of sackcrete. then hide it.

agreed

Two guys with pry bars can open just about any safe in a few minutes. Maybe not yours but more likely yours too. Burying is probably best but bury in more than one location. Hiding without burying is harder than you think as the places you think of to hide are the same places a burglar will think are good hiding spaces. I speak from experience as a victim, not a burglar. Also consider what you would do with a burglar holding a knife to the throat of one of your kids. You will have to give something up and if it's in one place you'll give it all.

Beyond bank safe deposit boxes, has anyone considered putting a safe in self storage?

Good idea or worried that your unit is busted open on the next episode of "Storage Wars"?

Probably one of the best. Watch the videos. Go for the medium to higher end model https://www.libertysafe.com/

What about hiding it up in your attic insulation? I am also in this same situation, a safe is obvious there is something valuable in there, even if its a paper with your SS# on it (identity theft). I believe in a fire safe for papers, pictures, and whatever other digital media you may have, but for valuables i'm not convinced a safe is safe.

Most safes are worthless unless they are made with hardened steel plate, not sheet metal. Any safe can be entered with enough time. You should have an alarm connected to the police so thieves will not have enough time to open the safe, although an attractive enough target may attract burglars able to circumvent most alarm systems. I would suggest the best alternative is to keep the bulk of a large amount of gold outside the US in private storage facilities like Das Safe in Vienna, Austria.

You can pick up good safes on Craig's List. But forget the old ones. they are too easy to open.

I would not use a safe. 

Much safer to hide in the house. You need to get creative. keep talking to people. Since it is metal a metal detector can find it. A good way to avoid that problem is to put the coins into a metal pipe. a metal detector can not tell there is metal inside a metal container. Now make the pipe look natural in the house or buried outdoors. 

One great way to hide the gold is to bury it outdoors and then build a big heavy shed ontop of it so that it takes a major operation for you to get to it. You have to tear down the shed and dig it up. I am not talking about those commercial sheds. I am saying you build your own like a house with heavy plywood and all. really solid and super heavy and strong. no one will suspect there is gold under that shed. But you can not get to it either. You can not add to it either.

Some people put in a pond over the gold. 

You need to find and fit something to your personal taste and resources. Someone living on 40 acres has different resourses then someone living in a high rise apartment building with a 1 room apartment. 

If you have X ingots of Silver then store them in X/2 different places - and not all in one building. Use multiple locations and be exactly as cute and ingenious as you like when hiding your precious metal. 

Sew single coins into garments. Hide ingots in hollowed out books. Bury coins in sections of capped off PVC pipe. Find or create crevices in your home and exploit them. Find cans of the right size, empty them, wash them out and reseal them with your silver inside. Stick some silver under your enormous freezer.

Tell exactly one (1) adult whom you trust with your life where your silver is. This should be someone who lives over 100 miles away - not someone who could be swept up in a home invasion.

If you can possibly manage it (and this is a tall order I admit) tell no-one else that you even own silver.

Have some 'throwdown' silver, including a few coins, in the obvious 'safe' to act as a sop to thieves. Perhaps in the safe, in a shoebox marked '"Stimulus Package!" or something like that to help convince casual thieves that this is your one true hoard that you a) dote on and b) spend hours rubbing on your naked body.

Finally: do not rely on just hiding your PMs. Use layered security. Do all this and also be prepared to defend your silver as you would defend your life and liberty. Because when the dollar collapses, that is what your silver will be worth.

Hope this was helpful.

best selection and good prices https://www.thesafewarehouse.com

PVC can leave a greenish milky goo on silver, devaluing your stash significantly if it spends too much time in direct contact with it.

https://coins.about.com/od/caringforcoins/f/pvc_damage_faq.htm

Personally, I'm not one of those whose overly paranoid of banks seizing the contents of safe deposit boxes, though I understand why people would be paranoid of doing that, and they certainly do a good job of keeping your stash secure and off site.

If I had to keep my stash at home, I would wrap it in several layers of protection (plastic wrap & wax paper) then put it in a PVC tube making sure none of the silver was in contact with the PVC, then I'd glue two caps on the ends and seal those with wax, then I'd dig a hole twice as deep in my backyard as I would normally need, I'd bury the pipe at the bottom, then about a foot above that, I'd put some junky metal, maybe an old toy or a couple of aluminum cans, so that if anybody used a metal detector looking for the stash, they'd serve as a decoy.

Oh, I'd also leave about one or two tubes out in a shoe box in the closet so any thieves looking around would assume they found the whole kit 'n' kaboodle.