The practical aspects of making money with time travel

Factual Questions
1

Let us imagine that I have $10,000 in seed money and a machine that will transport me (and a small amount of luggage) back in time 50 years. After spending six months in the past, the machine automatically whisks me back to the instant after I first turned it on.

Rather than use my time machine for good, (for example, warning the residents of Orleansville, Algeria of the impending earthquake on September 9, 1954), I’ve decided to use it to make me rich.

What’s the best way to go about this?

First off, how do I convert my $10,000 in capital into something I could spend back in 1954? Assuming I’m going back to the United States in 1954, gold wouldn’t work. The private ownership of gold wasn’t legal in the U.S. until the end of 1974. Can I go to a coin and currency dealer and get $10,000 worth of pre-1954 U.S. currency? How much of a premium would I pay?

How would I go about investing my money? Back then, could someone with no ID and a wad of cash just walk into a brokerage and open an account?

How would I reap my rewards? Would there be a way for me to set up some sort of trust to that would hold my investments for fifty years and then pay it off to me when I return to the future?

2

Your point about needing ID is a good one. I’d head for the racetracks instead. $10K and 6 months would make a lot of $2 bets.

If you could use a brokerage account of some sort, however, in 1954 your best bet would have been to invest in things with “General” and “American” in the title.

3

Yes you could certainly buy old coins or dollar bills at a coin shop. You could even buy gold coins. Owning collectible gold coins was always legal. However, gold and even silver coins would almost certainly not be the way to go as their premium over face value is probably highest. Buying pre-1954 pennies or nickels would probably have the smallest premium. But if your time machine had a weight limit that might not work either.

A better thing to do might be to figure out some item which was valuable (but available) then but cheap now. And one that wouldn’t raise too much suspicion if you had it. I’m not sure if there is something like say Roman artifacts that a large collection has turned up so their price has not kept up with inflation.

Actually investing the money would not be too much of a problem I wouldn’t think. With six months to work, you could easily open a bank account and establish credit to be able to open a brokerage account. The difficult thing might be to arrange to have your taxes paid, your account not deactivated for lack of use – things like that.

Another problem might be to establish your ownership of same when you arrive back in the present. Both of these problems probably could be handled by setting up a trust with your future self as beneficiary. Unfortunately you’d need to establish a trust which invested accoding to your instructions when you weren’t around to give them. Likewise, naming yourself as benficiary might cause problems if you aren’t at least 50 years old. I suppose you could name as beneficiary, the second son of someone or whatever clearly describes only you. An instruction to buy Microsoft in 1975 (or whenever) might raise some eyebrows since the company didn’t exist when you wrote the instructions. You might have to hire some kind of firm to hold and deliver letters from you at appropriate times.

With a little research you could simply find the one company which existed and has done the best in the past 50 years and just buy the stock that’s done teh best over teh past 50 years. It’s probably some small drug company which has now been purchased by a much larger one. If I had to go with no time for research, I’d pick IBM which hasn’t done too well lately, but had phenominal growth for many years.

4

Finding the magic product that’s mass-produced today, rare 50 years ago, easy to convert to cash in each location, and small enough to take with you in a large enough quantity sounds like an interesting question. I’d wonder what price, say, a current mass-produced Ruby would fetch 50 years ago, if that was before the chemically identical artificial rubies were invented.

As for transfering weath back to yourself, I’d suggest buying actual stock certficates and planting them in a safety deposit box. Pick one company that’s consistantly beat the market in the past 50 years (off the top of my head, look at IBM, McDonalds, Coca Cola, etc).

Pick them back up in the present, and any competent broker can help you figure out how to convert them to cash.

-lv

5

Rubies, Feh! Viagra! In 1954 it would be worth more than its weight in gold. :smiley:

6

Money’s easy. Scan some period currency and print it out on an inkjet printer before you left. The counterfeit should be undetectable fifty years ago.

7

Huh? An inkjet copy of 50-year-old currency wouldn’t fool anyone who was on the ball. The paper stock would be all wrong, and the fakes wouldn’t have the texture and “feel” of the engraving.

8

Syntex and GD Searle, two small cheap drug companies, who were just developing the birth control pill around that time.

Syntex also spun off Alza in the 1970’s which also did quite well, all 3 of which now are part of the big drug companies.

IBM grew quite a bit from 1954. You could also sell short Kresge/Kmart, Montgomery Wards, and Pan American Airlines.

9

You mean like American General?

Probably not a bad choice. Except it wasn’t publicly traded until 1969.

How about General Electric?

Myself, I’d just look for IPOs of smaller businesses that are big businesses today. Texas Instruments? Hewlett Packard? Xerox? CBS?

Get the stock certificates, and put them in a safe deposit box in a location that you know is still there in 2004. Do everything quietly, and don’t buy too large a position in any one company, so as to avoid altering the outcome of events.

Then spend the rest of your time having fun in South America or someplace.

And whatever you do, wear a condom!!!

10

Invest in collectables. You’d probably be able to find someone that would sell you Action Comics#1 for $100 or so. Pick up rare baseball cards for a few dollars each.

Also, buy an entire barrel of whiskey, and pay for 50 years of storage. Nip forward to the present day, barrel of 50 year old whiskey = big bucks.

11

What name do I register the certificates under?

And how do I handle the taxes on the dividends?

12

Buy 10,000 one-dollar bills. Bleach them out, print copies of a 1950 $20. Now you’ve got $200,000 in seed money. That’s some serious bucks in 1954. You can buy some excellent ID (as your own grandfather) and leave it to yourself. If you can find your grandfather’s ID from the time, you can make convincing copies on your current printer, I suspect, to take with you.

Transporting anything else will be problematic. Because of inflation, your $10,000 “today” dollars will buy only about $1430 worth of stuff. Now, it’s certainly possible that there’s something that is cheap now but expensive then–that would take research I’m not up for.

(CPI in 1954 is about 26.9 according to this site, while in 2004 it’s around 188–1982 dollars equal 100)

Coins, on the other hand, might be a reasonable (and legal) choice. Over here they have 1954-D Franklin Half dollars for $3 each. That means you could buy $3333 of them (or so) and have a nice bankroll in 1954. Stop in at the local library for 1954 newspapers, find some nice long-shot horse bets. Put the money down, collect your winnings. Then buy 1952 Franklin Half (Cameo, whatever that means–from the same site) and put 'em in a safe deposit box. Sell those puppies when you return ‘home’–for the $295 that they’re currently worth.

The turnover in currency alone is 10,000% making your $10,000 now = $1,000,000. Factor in your horsey winnings (1000 to 1?) and you’ve got a billion. Does a person really need more than that?

13

So long as you didn’t have more than $100 of them.

14

One possibility to get around any problems concerning bringing the bankroll to the present day might be to utilize your parents/grandparents. Make them rich so that you’ll inherit. Pass them a whole load of stock tips or horse race winners.

Of course, they may lose the money or cut you out of their will…

15

You’re right, of course. But that’s not what I meant. You’d have to find some decent paper, but not necessarily the real thing as someone above proposed.

I’m just noting that inkjet-printed counterfeits on plain cotton paper fool a large number of people today because of the high image quality; in an era where such “perfect” imaging was unavailable, I would expect to fool a lot more.

I’ve got a half-dozen (real!) bills in my pocket, and they all feel a little different, depending on age and wear. The oldest, most beat up ones are all but indistinguishable from a good piece of beat-up cotton bond by touch.

I don’t think that people would EXPECT counterfeit bills in that era, especially not small ones, so I think you could get away with it far more often than not. And if not, well, in six months you’re whisked out of jail…

16

Singularly unwise. You might get away with winning two or three big wagers, if you’ve already established yourself as a happy-go-lucky rich guy. But if you make five thousand horse bets and win them all, someone’s going to notice. Heck, even if you consistently win more money than you lose, someone’ll notice. And while you might get whisked out of jail in six months, the particular someones who notice might not be inclined to bother with such technicalities, and just kill you.

Now, myself, the first thing I’d do would be to hire a lawyer. Contrary to all the jokes you hear, you can absolutely trust a lawyer, to handle his client’s interests. Tell him that you want him to manage an estate, for an agreed-upon sum each month or year. If the estate is ever insufficient to pay him that, then he’s off the job. Leave him a set of envelopes labelled “do no open until date”, with instructions to purchase various stocks, and to sell others to pay his fee. Go ahead and include Microsoft, or whatever else. He may get suspicious, but you won’t be around to ask any more. Finally, the last envelope, labelled “do not open until September 8, 2004”, would direct him to deliver the estate to yourself.

If you wanted to be even more opaque about it, hire two folks, one to manage the estate, and the other to handle the envelopes. In this case, you’d want to double-nest your envelopes, so your envelope manager would open the outer one on the appropriate date, and send on the inner envelope without reading it (so he wouldn’t get suspicious). Your account manager then would just be getting letters, presumably written by you at the present time, so he wouldn’t get suspicious, either.

17

First off the money part is easy.
Diamonds. Worth a ton, small, easy to carry, and legal both now and then.
Next, what to buy? Buy land.
In 1954 you could buy land in Pacific Palisades, or the bay area, or even Beverly Hills for a song. Today that land is worth100s of times it worth in 1954.
Assuming you registered the deed in your name, arranged to have the property taxes paid, when you get back the property is already in your name.

18

As has been mentioned, I would go back and purchase a bunch of collectible items like comics & baseball cards. Just checking ebay, several 1950-1954ish baseball cards are selling for a couple thousand a piece. Comics that would have been cheap then are also selling for a lot now. Just buy a thousand or so cards and a bunch of early comics, and you will be set.

Buying collectables also allows you to dodge various tax problems/estate planning that you would have to deal with if you bought stock/land. Just bring the items back with you in the time machine, or stick them in a safety deposit box (that you pay for 50 years ahead of time, if you can.)

19

Just a thought…to take money back with you, could you simply set the time machine to go back to a country where owning gold was legal—I dunno, Canada? The U.K.? Mexico?—sell your gold to get local currency, then travel to the United States? (Just make sure not to get a ride on a DeHavilland Comet, or something. Better take a list of major air and rail disasters, so you’ll know what not to travel on, and when.)

Or, like other posters have said, convert your 2004 money into a precious metals or stones that iare legal to own at the time. (Silver? Platinum?)

Or your could take the more adventurous approach…get some dive training and the proper equipment, and go to the wreck of the treasure ship Atocha in 1954, and plunder just enough gold to make yourself rich, but not leaving nothing to be “discovered” in 1985.

20

It mightn’t be as easy as you think, RandomLetters. Firstly, catalogue prices don’t bear much resemblance to actual market value.

Secondly, the reason some cards etc are so valuable is because there are so few of them. You turn up with a bunch of stuff you may depress the market.

Thirdly, you will also have real problems convincing people that your stuff is genuine: due to being whisked forward in time fifty years, your cards and comics are going to be and look brand new, when if they are genuine they should be 50 years old. My guess is that many are going to think your stuff is fake.

Chronos I don’t think that gambling would be too much bother. You’ve got 6 months, and many forms of gambling are entirely anonymous. If you just make a few bets at one track (most random just for show, but say one big trifecta based on historic newspaper records) then act completely gobsmacked when you win, then move interstate and do it all again I don’t think you’ll arouse too many suspicions. As long as you don’t make your wins so huge that you get publicity, and as long as you always dress and act like just a regular guy who’s hit it big this one time, and don’t get flashy or appear rich you’d be OK.

Also, Chronos, I think the lawyer idea in your suggested form has problems. The biggest basic problem is that 50 years is a hellava long time for an estate with no known or contactable beneficiary to just hang around. Many lawyers would be very very suspicious as to what the hell the deal was when you walked into their office off the street and suggested such a thing. The type of lawyer who is not going to ask a lot of very hard to answer questions is not the type of lawyer you are going to want to trust to act appropriately for 50 years with no one to keep an eye on him. Heck, he or she’s probably going to retire and/or die in that time. What happens at that point? What is the structure you are going to set up? Any structure you set up has to have a beneficiary at the bottom? Who’s that?

What happens if the tax authorities hear about the situation (and they may well do, someone may well notice sooner or later that there is this massive property owner who no one has ever seen). They are going to ask to audit the client. Who is that? Why hasn’t the client ever paid any tax?

Nah, such an irregular based-on-trust arrangement is a bit dodgy if you ask me.

Here’s my modified suggestion. You start with your initial stake and build it up through whatever chosen means (gambling, stock investment etc) to a pretty impressive level.

Get a lawyer to draw up what would be a moderately complex but nonetheless workable trust deed setting up a trust. The deed will name as beneficiaries your own then-existing family. Tell the lawyer you are a family friend who wants to repay your family for a past good deed anonymously. Write guidance into the trust deed as to suitable investments. To avoid suspicion, it would probably be best if this guidance was fairly general (ie not “buy this company stock on such and such a date” but rather “invest in this type of company” and “invest in land in these general areas”). Tie the lawyers/investment advisors fees to outcomes.

Ensure that your family knows about the trust before your six months is up. You have now ensured that you have a group of people with a direct financial interest in the money to ensure that the lawyer/investment advisor don’t go astray, and to provide instructions if required, and to satisfy the tax authorities etc as to what is going on.

Allow your family only a certain income from the trust, not access to the whole income and certainly not to the capital.

Then, finally, shape the deed so that the whole trust fund vests in you, in 2004. The way to do this would be to ensure that the deed looks as if it was “drawn blind” but actually aims at you ie have it say for example “the whole fund shall vest in the first born grandson of [name your grandfather here]” or "the first member of the family to complete a Master’s degree in [insert your qualification here].

Of course, you start getting into severe time travel paradoxes here: if you go back and set this up then will that change the course of your family such that your planning will go wrong? Will your father (now a rich man) marry someone he otherwise wouldn’t so you are never born?