I'm not in it yet, as I don't have the savings to dive into it, but I can totally understand what you are saying.  It's crazy to see the gains of the PP, and it makes so much sense it's hard to believe all the financial used car salesman out there peddling 60/40 stocks & corp. bonds. Also, it is...

Further, if you track your individual contribution to certain taxable funds in excel, you're allowed to use a method of gain recognition where you can go in and pick an individual security purchase and treat that as your sale... so when you sell gold, sell your most recent (high cost, low gain) purc...

Gold is a fickle B!tch... It sucks picking up a 28% rate, but you can only put so much in tax-deferred accounts, and really, gold doesn't belong there with no interest/dividends... here's the trick though. Since the PP is so volatile in individual pieces, usually something's going down if gold is sk...

The next piece brings me to tax-deferred accounts (IRA, Roth IRA, 401k, Roth 401k... even Health Savings Accounts, your kid's 529 education plan, educational IRAs, etc.) With all of these you have to weigh 1) liquidity risk: In a real time of need, do you want something stuck in an account that your...

I am an accountant and would like to offer some insight and a general discussion about tax efficiency: Here is a short description of the problems/benefits of each section of the permanenent portfolio: Stocks: Dividends are issued yearly for some of the TSM, so there is some tax inefficiency, but mo...