Don't get Cyprused - cardinal rules for protecting your assets

Cyprus bank customers with assets exceeding € 100,000 will be taxed with 37.5 % as reported by Friedlnews. BBC further reports that big savers could effectively loose up to 60% of their savings. Up to 22.5% will go into a fund attracting no interest and may be subject to further write-offs. The other 40% will attract interest but this will not be paid unless the bank performs well - a very unlikely scenario. This seizing of a large chunk of depositor assets by a Government can happen just about anywhere - Cyprus is only the unfortunate canary in the financial coal mine. I have a few cardinal rules to protect assets in the long term which savers will do well to heed:

1. Return "off" assets is more important than return "on" assets - In other words attractive looking assets such as cloud computing equities may do well in the immediate short but they are getting to be bubbles of massive proportions - so best to stay away.

2. The Euro is effectively a currency on life support and not tenable in the long term - avoid investing anything in Euros or Euro denominated market instruments. The story of Cyprus is likely to get repeated in other Euro zone countries over the medium term.

3. Gold is a good holder of value in the medium term but unlikely to do well over the long term.

4. Isle of Man or the Channel Islands are quite possibly the safest jurisdictions for holding assets compared to other offshore jurisdictions for cash assets as well as from a tax perspective.

5. It is very prudent to have some of your non cash assets invested in real estate, farm land, water resources, food commodities and energy.