Buying property, gold or land: what to do with cash under inflation

Cash is dying in the bank and property alone is no longer enough

With European inflation heading for double digits and pensions threatening to swallow the budget, the question is no longer whether to invest, but where to hide your money so inflation doesn't eat it alive. An investor with a flat and a garage in his portfolio, part of his capital in cryptocurrencies "sine die" and gold at all-time highs, sums up the dilemma: he wants something tangible and real, not a financial product, and money sitting idle in the bank looks to him like a loss waiting to happen.

The starting premise is uncomfortable: fixed-income plans promise 4-5% over five or ten years, and a single month of inflation eats that figure. Within that framework, the range of answers opens up in three directions that are not mutually exclusive: physical assets with structural demand, businesses that generate cash, and training so as not to depend on a single source of income.

Land, water and something to plant

The most down-to-earth proposal in the discussion is also the oldest: a plot of land near home with water and the possibility of planting. Against the sophistication of packaged products, the logic is simple —an asset you can touch, that isn't traded on any exchange and that produces something— although it requires knowledge of the soil, permits and a management capacity that no brochure explains.

Training as an investment is added to that idea. The argument doing the rounds is that if you are no longer at an age to profit from professional retraining, you won't reap the rewards of any other investment either. The implicit conclusion is harsh: the most profitable asset at a certain stage of life is not depending on a single source of income, and that is worth more than any financial product.

Commodities and palladium as a ten-year bet

Among the metals, gold and silver are ruled out for being at all-time highs. Attention shifts to palladium, with a staggered strategy explained without mincing words: buy an initial position, double it if the price falls to 750, quadruple it if it drops to 500 and, if it sinks to 250, mortgage the house. The stated horizon is ten years, and the thesis rests on commodities becoming expensive again.

It is a bet of conviction, not of consensus. Nobody really knows what will happen, and the track record of someone who has been watching the market for three years confirms it: almost everything is at all-time highs and disaster has been expected for a long time without arriving. The strategy of buying in stages is, at bottom, a way of admitting that timing is impossible.

The conservative portfolio that looks to France

Against physical assets, another camp defends equities in global companies. The portfolio described as ultra conservative includes Air Liquide, AXA, Saint Gobain, Bankinter, BNP Paribas, Schneider Electric, Eiffage and Danone. The objection comes quickly: there is little that is conservative about it, and quite a lot that is French, although the rebuttal is that listing in Paris says nothing about where these companies operate, which are global except for Bankinter.

The case of Crédit Agricole illustrates the volatility of this route: it was bought taking advantage of the drop linked to the political situation in France, with the rebound in mind. The underlying question is whether European equities are a refuge or a trap when the ECB keeps monetising debt and wages are not rising at the pace of prices.

The other currency and the tech giants that won't disappear

The classic recipe against inflation is to diversify into a more stable currency, not Argentine pesos. And at the opposite extreme, the bet on the big tech companies: Alphabet or Amazon, which are starting to look cheap on fundamentals, with a cold line of reasoning —in ten years, will they cease to exist, or will they be worth two or three times their current market cap?

The problem is that nobody has the answer. Idle money keeps dying of laughter in the bank, the property is already owned, gold is expensive and palladium takes nerve. The conversation gets stuck exactly there: which tangible asset is worth converting cash into when inflation runs faster than any promised return.