Write Down This Date: July 1st, 2014

“On this date, U.S. House of Representatives Bill “H.R. 2847″ goes into effect. It will usher in the true collapse of the U.S. dollar, and will make millions of Americans poorer, overnight. You now have just several months to prepare…”

This week I had a long-standing client email me re H.R. 2847 and how it would impact our decisions going forward. Knowing that this individual was a talk show aficionado, I immediately surmised he was taken in by one of the many commercials predicting doom and gloom. There is an entire industry capitalizing on our natural fear of loss and it is growing exponentially as the baby boomers near retirement and worry about their financial security.

Snopes.com is a great source for facts about internet rumors, wive’s tales and urban legends. I provide the following from Snopes for your benefit in hopes that the next time you hear one of these doom and gloom messages you recognize it for what it’s worth. Absolutely nothing. Unless, of course, you’re selling the remedy!

Origins: This item about the passage of H.R. 2847 causing the U.S. dollar to collapse as of 1 July 2014 is another example financial scarelore put out in conjunction with an investment come-on, in this case an ominous sales pitch put out by the folks at Stansberry & Associates Investment Research LLC.

This latest panic piece is offered in a Stansberry & Associates presentation featuring a number of scary-sounding statements about how we in the U.S. are soon to experience a “near-complete shutdown of the American economy,” will see “the savings of millions wiped out,” will be living under the imposition of martial law by the federal government, and will be struggling in the aftermath of a number of other apocalyptic financial scenarios.

And according to Stansberry & Associates, this remarkable, radical collapse of the United States monetary system and “our normal way of life” is going into effect in a mere matter of months (just like a similar recent conspiracy scare about the federal government’s plan to eliminate 16 states from the U.S. in the very near future).

But wait … all one needs in order to avoid suffering from this devastating national calamity, one that will collapse our entire monetary system and spell doom for the American way of life, is a little information. Information that can be yours if you’ll just shell out $149 for a one-year subscription to Stansberry’s Investment Advisory newsletter.

In other words, if a financial company spews a bunch of stuff that sounds sufficiently alarming, and then promotes its product as something that will help protect people against this horribly scary thing, it might be able to lure gullible folks into believing that a “fairly easy and inexpensive to protect themselves” against losing their money is for them to send their money to that company instead. And, unfortunately, such schemes work often enough to keep these types of schemers in business.