Is there a consensus on the best proportion of 1/3/6/12-month T-bills for a ladder?

Bron, thanks for all the good info.  I am very new to this subject, so please forgive me if I ask silly questions.  My broker can show me the bid/ask spread when I buy now, but is my total fee for that gold allotment also going to depend on the bid/ask spread at the time I sell years down the road?

Here's what I'm trying to understand.  If somewhere down the road, cash gets very valuable all of a sudden and I have a lot of I-Bonds instead of T-Bills, will I have missed a huge price jump that would likely have helped my cash portion pass the 35% rebalancing band that would have triggered buying...

I've been reading here about I-bonds, and they sound like a good place for some of my deep taxable cash.  I understand I can only buy $10k per year, have to hold for at least one year, and pay a 3-month penalty if redeem in less than 5 years.  Here's my question:  from an overall HBPP perspective, w...

Is there a way of seeing what the buy/sell spread is at any given time, so I can try to time my purchase when it is low?

Will the buy/sell spread when I go to sell (hopefully many, many years down the road) affect my final total fees for this portion of my gold?

For any investment you should track your basis. For debt-type instruments I also like to track the yield (annual rate). For bonds/bills purchased on the secondary market you should track what if any premium/discount to face value at time of purchase.  (Which can then be used to calculate your actua...

I'm very new around here, so I'm not quite sure what the deal is with simba's spreadsheet.  What are the deficiencies?  I tried searching the forum for "simba", but I didn't get much info.

Newbie question here.  For PMGOLD, Bron mentions the 0.15% management fee and a 1% buy/sell spread.  I didn't know about the 1% buy/sell spread.  I figured that was part of the management fee.  To compare apples to apples with IAU, which has a 0.25% expense ratio, is there a buy/sell spread, or any ...

#1 sounds better to me too, but I backtested it from 1972 - 2010 with the RiskCog portfolio optimizer and #2 came out slightly better (this assumes that the stable-value fund acts just like T-bills, which probably isn't true).  #1 had an annual return of 9.37% with a worst year of -5.32%, and #2 had...

Are there any other similar, free tools available? 

I'd like to check my results against something else to verify.

Is this considered a good tool for backtesting various asset allocations:

http://www.riskcog.com/portfolio-theme2 ... c5z83ff4kb

I'm getting 1.17% on up to $25k at First Bank & Trust in Brookings, South Dakota.  Weiss gives them a B- grade, which is OK I think.