It’s a common legend that people can move to first-world country with nothing but a suitcase and become wealthy.
To test this a legion of insane billionaire’s have offered to fill your suitcase with anything you want, aside from legal documents/certificates/non-circulating notes.
You can fill it with legal and illegal things, but the billionaires aren’t insane enough to verify your ownership of anything illegal.
I saw that article last week. I was surprised there was no mention of Saffron. You could probably do well filling it was a good amount of saffron, provided you could move it at a decent price and quickly enough once you got where you were going. It might be best to negotiate a price with a few people ahead of time. I don’t know what kind of quantities major users of saffron buy in, but I’d be worried that showing up with 500 pounds of it all at once might cause the market to drop. It would be best to have a handful of people, ready to buy a the same time without them all know about each other.
In fact, that might be wise for anything that’s rare enough that you’ll flood the market with your suitcase full of it.
I think I’d go with 4 or 5 half shoebox size hunks of uranium and the. Fill the rest of the suit case with lead. That way I do t die of radiation poisoning and then I’d sell the fisanable materials to someone questionable and walk away rich.
A standard carry-on suitcase (22" x 14" x 9") should hold just about $4 million, and I won’t have to worry about supply and demand, price fluctuations, and all those pesky details.
I used to package safron in the early 70’s, I think it was about $35.00 an ounce back then. I think they called it stemen. I believe the packages were 1 gram.
I was going to say cocaine but I had no idea LSD was so much more valuable. I guess it makes sense, but who is going to buy all that LSD? If you glut the market the price goes down.
If possible, I would fill it with the manmade chemical elements (the largest atoms on the periodic table). I believe those are worth a lot. However the market is likely pretty small and I don’t know how much I could get for them. Plus they are unstable.
Back when I was in college, a hit was $5.00 and came on a little piece of paper that was probably about a quarter inch square. If you sold it at retail, that would be $935,000 per ream of paper. How many reams can you get in a suit case? Then, the question is, how much liquid does it take to make that much acid and what’s the volume of the suitcase?
And, like I said, before, the trick to not saturating the market is to find enough buyers to move all your product at once before they find out about each other. The market will be saturated, but you’ll be gone before anyone realizes it. Besides, as long as all the people you sold it to paid the same price, it won’t really matter. In any of these cases, the problem is if you sold a third of your product to one person for one price, a third to another person for that price and the last third to someone else for a considerably cheaper price. The first two people are going to be stuck until the last person runs out and the price jumps back up. If it’s something like hundreds of thousands of hits of acid in a small area, that could be years.
One problem with saffron is that it’s a plant material, and might be confiscated by customs officials. BTW, I bought an ounce of good Spanish saffron for my mother a couple of years ago. It cost, I think, about $80 per ounce.
And I know of a real-life version of this scenario. A friend emigrated from the USSR with his parents around 1978. They were limited in the amount of cash they could carry, so they looked for something that they could buy in quantity and sell in the west. They settled on 35mm camera shutter releases (as in this Wikipedia photo). They filled a suitcase with them and sold them in the streets in Rome, where they first landed. They didn’t get rich, but raised a little bit of money.
By international standards, the US’s largest generally circulating bill ($100) isn’t that big. Dollars have the advantage of being accepted almost everywhere, but in terms of value-per-volume, you’d be able to carry ~$26m in 500 Euro notes, ~$40m in 1000 Swiss Franc notes, or ~$308m in 10,000 Singapore Dollar notes.
