What is the minimum amount of money that you guys (and gals) would need in order to feel comfortable calling it "F-you money" and not just an emergency fund? And would you feel comfortable allowing your emergency fund to double as F-you money? It seems to me that if the point of an emergen...

I'm a pretty hardcore libertarian, but I'll acknowledge that there's a LOT of low-hanging fruit if the government really wanted to make this market work better, such as abolishing pharmaceutical patents, ending the tax advantages of employer-sponsored health insurance, doing away with the AMA's med...

Thank the War on Drugs.

Gasoline prices are still going down, down, down. The last time the drop was this steep was in mid-2008 at the start of the sharp recession. Might this indicate that we're about to start seeing a lot more news stories in the coming weeks about financial crises, bankruptcies, and business contraction...

Buy it while it's free!

In order for a 25% LTT allocation to hit a 35% rebalancing band, LTTs have to rise in price by 40%. The lowest LTT yield that supports a 40% increase in bond price is 1.3%. At yields below that, your max upside drops below 40%, so your LTTs would be increasingly unlikely to hit that rebalancing ban...

Here's my point. If instead of using gold as a currency, we used something that was "free" or near free to make/acquire, then we wouldn't be wasting global resources to digging gold up. There's overhead involved in digging up gold. What if we put those same people to work doing something ...

This is a pretty good show, thanks for the recommendation! I've watched 7 or 8 episodes so far and am now hooked.

There's definitely a lot to be said for not storing your coins at home.  A lot of people say "well, I have a safe."  This does you no good when the thief simply holds a gun to your wife's head and says "open the safe." That's why anyone storing a large amount of gold at home wou...

If I understood the article correctly, the author's main thesis is that aside from the expense ratio, ETFs have two "intangible costs": Bid-ask spread Index tracking error For buy-and-hold investors who trade only infrequently, the bid-ask spread is essentially a non-issue. As for index tr...

I do intend to go the physical route eventually and my current thinking is to store the bulk in the Perth Mint but keep enough on hand that I have plenty of time to get to Australia in a SHTF situation. But then again, how do I know I can trust the keepers of the Perth Mint any more than I can the ...

A while back on this forum, a few of us discussed the fact that gasoline prices historically have tended to increase noticeably prior to recessions. At the time, I had the Austrian mindset that the high gasoline prices just prior to the recessions were likely more of an effect than a cause. Specific...

I wouldn't want to piss off criminals with fake stuff unless I had plans to move out the next day. I'd rather have a stash of $1000-2000 in REAL bills for them to discover in a strongbox or desk drawer to keep them away from the real stash. If someone finds out that I do have coins and I haven't mo...

hoost, Xan, and foglifter: +1 I am constrained to hold far less physical gold than I would prefer since the majority of my taxable savings consists of an emergency fund and a growing down payment for a home. Once we purchase a home in a few years, I'll start converting as much of the gold allocation...

I've recently been developing a taste for scotch, and my most recent purchase was a bottle of Glenmorangie (evidently the best-selling single malt in Scotland). It's quite good. I'm also partial to dark, malty, complex beers such as imperial stouts and barleywines. Deschutes "The Abyss" an...

If you were to view your one day per week simply as an enjoyable hobby, then I suppose any kind of "employee discount" you might receive would just be icing on the cake. If your primary goal is to save money, however, your one day per week might be better spent doing more lucrative work. T...

Several years ago I even believed that my financial planner had my best interest at heart.  He would invite me to investment seminars sponsered by GE, Met Life, etc.  I understood very little of what they were talking about.  I just trusted him to put me in the best investments.  After the market d...

AdamA and MT are right. To convince yourself, you can use an online bond price calculator like this one or this one to see exactly what happens to the bond price as yields go negative. For example, if you buy a $1000 30-year Treasury bond at a 3% coupon rate, you get: Yield (%)  Price ($) --------- ...

Peter Schiff has a new book out. [...] I'll bet it's a few hundred pages that basically say, "Printing money causes inflation."   [...] There was a time when I hung on Peter Schiff's every word... As did I. Peter Schiff has seemingly made some good predictions over the years, but then he ...

Known, predictable expenses should really be added to the top of "emergency fund" expenses.  When this is things like vacations & unnecessary home improvements, it has the side effect of acting like an emergency fund if you DO have to tap your emergency fund for reasons that scare you...

Thanks for your ideas, everyone! Yes, we also still rent and have a nice pile of cash (we're fans of the 100% down plan). You plan to buy your home with cash? Wow. Interesting crowd on this PP forum! The term "emergency" is something that probably cannot be strictly defined and and we coul...

It sounds like HB's recommended method of adding new funds to the PP had more to do with simplicity than momentum. Here's the relevant passage from Fail-Safe Investing : After you set up the Permanent Portfolio, you probably will want to add to it over time. Whenever you have additional funds to inv...

You could probably use a simple trend filter to improve the odds of avoiding a falling knife. Using a trend filter would be an example of market timing, and as I mentioned in my previous post, I prefer to avoid market timing. The PP isn't the appropriate investment strategy for people who like to t...

I'm interested in hearing what "rules" some of you may have for yourselves regarding when you would allow yourself to dip into your emergency cash. The reason I ask is that it took me several years to accumulate an emergency fund consisting of 12 months of typical expenses. It's an interes...

Here's a very funny (I think) Howard Stern rant about the stock market and financial advisors. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X43RkcC4Zuk&feature=related 6:48 NOTE:  Could be categorized as extremely offensive due to repeated use of the F-bomb.  That's a good rant! Along the same lines, here's ...