perhaps thats not disappearing though, merely hiding. I mean, being a cash in hand bike courier isn't going to set up a pension fund, is it? Old age is a long way off when you are 25, but it comes along eventually
The easiest thing to do would probably be to buy gold, which is not inflationary like money is supposed to be. Of course that's not as good as an index fund, but at least it's not cash.
You could also become a loan shark, which can be lucrative, but your illegal status would give your customers leverage against you, which is something you really don't want if this is your retirement savings...
Keeping money under the mattress is a good way to get cleaned out if anyone gets too curious about how such a person saves.
Becoming a loan shark is a possibility, I suppose, but puts someone in direct competition with professional criminals and creates a whole new set of existential and legal problems.
One low-risk strategy I've heard of being used by cash-savvy people is purchasing food stamps at a discount to their face value. Again, pretty much any kind of black market activity comes with legal risks.
Here's an idea: selling ETFs as physical documents, or as a sort of cryptocurrency. You could trade with others like cash, except it rises with inflation.
I don't think you could really disappear depending on your pursuer/ threat model. However, if you were to make more money than you needed to survive you could presumably invest in something like Bitcoin or alt-currency and with the legalisation of crowd-funding you could potentially also make tangible investments in companies through similar mechanisms to the blockchain.
Again, I don't think you could knock the ball out of the park or allude a motivated state agency if you were a terrorist or something; but if you were in a similar position to the subject of the article you could probably avoid capture and maintain a semblance of normalcy.
