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pcm comments on How long will Alcor be around? - Less Wrong
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Bankruptcy is normally means having debts that can't be paid, and Alcor goes out of its way to avoid having anything that could be a debt, and is careful to maintain funds that can be used to continue to keep its patients preserved. This kind of conservatism comes at some cost in its ability to grow, so it doesn't require unusually good management to have a higher than normal chance of continuing to exist.
There seem to have been two cryonics organizations that failed (CSC and CSNY). Some patients at CSNY were unharmed by that failure, so having your organization fail doesn't automatically imply death. Plus people have learned from those failures.
Your chances of surviving your cryo company going bust may depend on how seriously society in general takes the idea that you aren't dead yet.
So Alcor has, essentially, something like an endowment fund the investment returns from which pay for the expenses of maintaining the cryo facilities.
That raises an interesting question of what will happen to Alcor in the case of a purely financial crisis -- say a market crash or a hyperinflationary episode...
Some types of financial crises would destroy them unless they could attract new donations. But by investing in stocks and land you can protect yourself from hyperinflation.
You can't protect yourself from hyperinflation and volatility at the same time. If you are afraid of volatility you put money into cash and fixed income instruments which are highly exposed to inflation. If you are afraid of inflation you put money into hard assets and stocks, but these are risky investments and are subject to considerable volatility.
Don't forget that you also MUST earn sufficient return to cover the running expenses.
You can buy Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities.
Also, I'm not convinced those would protect against hyperinflation, given the kinds of things countries suffering from hyperinflation tend to do.
Yes, you can buy TIPS the return on which is, to a first approximation, zero.