FWIW I am 56 and look at my current assets as most of what I will be able to accumulate in my working career. As such, I am trying to be super cautious about protecting what I have. I went with a standard 4X25 at the beginning of this year. Any VP I have is just vestigial and will be gone as soon as...

Aaaaahhhhhhh! This is too complicated to resolve on a Sunday afternoon with limited time! PS, I hope your wife benefits some from the climate there in NM. You and TripleB are, of course, correct about the insurance companies. Sometimes the emotion in connection with my own personal medical history o...

When I see rates like .85% or .9%, I immediately think about what $100,000 would generate over a year. At .85%, you get almost $2.33 per day. Big whoop. Or, to look at it another way, you can double your money in 84 years. In a way I am lucky to have grown up during the 1970s because I can remember ...

As a concept, health "insurance" only makes sense for unexpected and catastrophic medical expenses. Everything else should be paid for in cash or with a membership cost-sharing plan or something. This is how everything else subject to insurance operates, and trying to force medical insura...

It rendered them uninsurable because they health insurance isn't really insurance. It's a method of prepaying for healthcare. Why would a private entity want to insure someone who has a 100% chance of costing them more than the policy premium? Car insurance companies don't insure frequent drunk dri...

Reub,

Any catch with Ally Bank? I just looked them up and see that there is also "No minimum deposit to open" &
"No monthly maintenance fees." How are they able to offer that rate of return? Thanks.

However, any increase in long term bonds will tend to offset the drop in stocks.  If stocks drop 50% and long term bonds only increase 20%, the overall portfolio (assuming gold stays the same) decreases by about 7.5%.  Way better than a 60/40 BH portfolio (which would drop by something like 25%). T...

I like having cash on hand. I don't go overboard but I also think there are advantages to having a cash stash. In a panic, don't expect to be able to get much from the bank. But, when considering theft, it's also a question of total amount of assets. For example, you don't want $10,000 in cash in yo...

Self-employed worker here, and I have to say that my feelings on The ACA so far are mixed. As WiseOne says, the in-network/out-of-network problem has not been fixed and that is a big headache. Eight months in and I am still trying to figure out if I will ultimately spend more or less on healthcare. ...

Here's the message you get if you start watching the aforelinked video and you actually lose interest and try to close out that window: Are you sure you want to leave this page? ******************** URGENT MESSAGE: WHAT IF I'M RIGHT? My colleagues at the CIA are already beginning to prepare for the ...

Is this guy just a doomer porn guy?

http://pro.moneymappress.com/MMRBSSH39/ ... 778&h=true

Whenever I see him "interviewed", it's just some guy lobbing softballs up to the plate. This link is an elaborate book pitch, but does anyone take him seriously or even half-way so?

Thanks for posting that, Kevin. I have a copy of Fail-Safe on order. I totally get that you PP vets find the minutiae of the PP repetitive, but it takes us newcomers a while to internalize the whole package. We need you guys as our support group from time to time. I make a lot of wisecracks on this ...

Dualstow, Gloating is always time well spent. The reason we hold a diversified asset mix is so that we always have something to gloat about. At least that is my understanding of the PP!

"Honey the renovations are done. I'll just throw all our belongings in this row boat and we'll sail up river. It's more direct and..."

Gold, however desirable, is certainly NOT recognized as money :). Moda, Please explain yourself. Are you saying that you can't exchange a gold coin for something you want? I really don't know the answer to this... I sometimes imagine a SHTF scenario where the whole financial system has melted down ...

I, like PS & KevinW, like to have something close to a PP in each account, if possible. As PS says, you may sacrifice some tax efficiency doing it that way (meaning that you have some gold and some cash in tax-advantaged space), but I think you give yourself tons of options down the road when yo...

There was a long email letter by John Mauldin today, making the case for a prolonged secular rise in the value of the dollar, based on what's being done in other economies and their currencies. He expects long bond yields to go even lower, gold goes nowhere or down, cash remains trash.  For stocks,...

Tech, $10 an ounce is pennies in the grand scheme of things. Chin up. I often wonder why Fidelity is so damn slow though. Are other places (Vanguard, TD Ameritrade, etc.) any quicker in settling trades? That being said, I think there are a couple of different ways to see what cash is available to tr...

As ALWAYS, I got hosed on my sale and repurchase.  :P Tech, Please keep us abreast of your future intentions so that we can all cash in on your bad timing.  ;) Seriously, this HAS to be a perception thing, right? PS had a recent post where he observed that an asset always goes down right after he h...

A couple of weeks ago two friends of mine were talking about a book called The Crash of 2016 . I asked them what crash was predicted and they took it as given that anyone with half a brain would understand that they were talking about the stock market. It's a nice feeling to just be able to say &quo...

Don't know how much difference it makes in the big picture but I did lighten up a bit on LTTs during that spike this morning. It feels great to sell high but when I look at how little $ I actually "took off the table" in profits, well, let's just say that, as always, it's best to concentra...

Yeah, obviously these bonds have carried the portfolio this year against anything the "experts" would have predicted. When I was trying to figure out how to make transactions on a new TD Ameritrade account earlier this year, the dude I was talking to strongly recommended that I not buy LTT...

Dualstow, I thought you were riding to my rescue but instead you are doing an imitation of Reagan at the Iran-Contra hearings! :) Chief Inquisitor: Can you tell us why Barrett's long bonds are not tracking the indices? Reagan: Well he could have just bought the wrong bonds but I really don't remembe...

Another question for you guys... My LTT's are almost all 11/15/43 issues. (^TYX) shows the 30-year bond went down 1.89% yesterday. Fidelity shows my bonds only went up .55%. I realize that these numbers are not supposed to match but this much of a discrepancy surprised me. Anyone have an explanation...

The long bond ended today yielding 2.96. Is anyone else trimming their holdings a bit? This was the asset that was the hardest for me to commit to and I just can't see bonds doing so well that they go up to 35% of my PP. I've sold a few but only to bring my bond allocation back to 25%. Just curious ...