Here's my interpretation with: 25% total stock market 25% long term treasuries 25% gold 25% reits [img width=500]http://i64.tinypic.com/1yww00.jpg[/img] It's kinda like the PP on steroids. Not bad.  One thing that makes me pause is that once you account for REITs in the total stock market fund an t...

Marc Faber has been saying for a while that he recommends an asset allocation of 25% gold, 25% stocks, 25% bonds (and cash), and 25% real estate.  I don't think he ever says how much cash he holds.  So, this made me wonder if anyone has done a back test of 25% gold, 25% stocks, 25% bonds, and 25% re...

3% probably is overly conservative (if it's set for tax reasons only).  If you're paying 25% as an overall tax rate, presumably you have income from other sources which would reduce the amount you need to draw from the portfolio. I was puzzling about this as well, and decided to discount my project...

My approach is to ensure that I never withdraw more than 3% for living expenses - and then just pay whatever taxes come up out of the portfolio cash fund. I was thinking the same thing - that I could just spend 3% out of the 4%, and save the remaining 1% for taxes, but that seems overly conservativ...

A conservative, safe withdrawal rate for the PP appears to be 4%.  In a taxable account, some taxes may be incurred on the 4% withdrawal.  But it seems very complicated to estimate those taxes.  For example, when cashing out of assets early on, taxes will be minimal because gains have been minimal. ...

As all sailors know, it is a bad sign when you suddenly notice rats scurrying around the deck while wearing life vests. Huge and ever-growing national debts, unfunded liabilities rising to the height of the Tower of Babel, ZIRP, NIRP, the dubious effectiveness of additional QE binging, a generalize...

One of the biggest concerns with PHYS is that when shareholders redeem their shares for physical gold, all the shareholders have to pay taxes on any capital gains the fund had earned from the transaction (the difference in price between the price that PHYS paid for the gold and the value of the shar...

Isn't there a risk with tax loss harvesting in the event the asset you exchanged then quickly shoots up in price and you need to rebalance? This could force you to either pay short term capital gains (at the ordinary income tax rate) or else delay rebalancing, I would think. So, if you sell your VT...

Isn't there a risk with tax loss harvesting in the event the asset you exchanged then quickly shoots up in price and you need to rebalance? This could force you to either pay short term capital gains (at the ordinary income tax rate) or else delay rebalancing, I would think. So, if you sell your VTI...

Maybe it's just my imagination, but it seems like most of the time when there is bad economic news, gold and Treasuries move up together while the stock market goes down.  And when there is good economic news (like today), stocks go up and gold and Treasuries go down.  So, this makes me wonder, how ...

The safe withdrawal rate is calculated from your liquid investments that you can sell 4% of every year to pay the bills.  You can't do that with your house, so it doesn't count.  Your home equity does count towards your net worth, but that's a different measure that is unrelated to SWRs. Just looki...

Home equity is irrelevant to a retirement calculation because you can't access the value that the home equity represents without selling your house and upending your life. Mortgage payments should be considered expenses, which will therefore require you to sock away $25 per dollar of your mortgage ...

There seems to be somewhat of a consensus that 4% is the maximum SWR for the PP.  I have a mortgage, so how does that work into the SWR calculation?  If I was renting, I would think my rent payments would count 100% towards the withdrawal rate.  But since I am building equity in my home every time I...

Seems good based on 43 years of history, but with only 10% gold, in the event of a SHTF complete meltdown much worse than 2008 (hasn't happened in the last 43 years), it may not be ideal.  If you read about the economic collapse in Iceland where the long term government bonds ended up flat (after sh...

I didn't suffer heavy losses in 2015 thanks to the permanent portfolio. However, it was still a difficult year of investment for me. I am still afraid to get started with my investments again. So far, I have only bought gold and bonds because the stock market has been bearish in Europe and Sweden s...

=Index(importxml("http://wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3020-treasury.html","//tr[td='"&D6&"']"),1,4) Where D6 is my cell with the maturity in it. I can't even remember where I got that formula from. Probably fnord. Regarding importing long term Treasury prices into...

After doing a little bit of research, the only pure play stock for driverless cars appears to be Mobileye, ticker MBLY.  The stock is apparently at an all-time low right now.  Assuming that driverless cars are going to happen and will be the norm over the next 10 or so years, is this a good company ...

There are a couple of points to notice here: 1. The Nordic countries are very homogeneous socially. This makes socialism work a lot better than it does with heterogeneous societies like the US. 2. They also aren't that socialistic. In fact, they aren't even as socialistic as the US in some ways: &q...

Jason, If you haven't visited Tyler's "Portfolio Charts" yet, you should really spend some time on his site. The answer to your question is in the leftmost 2nd and 3rd columns of the chart at this link: http://portfoliocharts.com/portfolio/permanent-portfolio/ Wow, thanks Mark!  I actuall...

A lot of Libertarian literature discusses how the elite/special interests have been pushing for socialism in the US for 100 plus years because, since they exert such strong influence over the the US government, then the bigger and more powerful the government becomes, the wealthier and more powerful...

Hello, I started doing the PP in June of 2013 and here I am, a full 2 1/2 years later, and I am only up a total of about 3.4% since I started.  I am averaging around a 1.4% annual yield.  Is this the worst 2 1/2 year period in the history of the PP?  If not, is it one of the worst?  How does it stac...

Have you heard of the Great Depression? Maybe you should read up on it.  :P How did single family rentals perform during the great depression? Did rents drop a lot? Did vacancies skyrocket? https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=9m1 The above has nothing to say about vacancy rates but shows...

Also, getting back to the risk involved - in a SHTF scenario, could I take a huge hit?  Is anyone aware of a period, say, the past 100 years, in the US where owning a bunch of small rental homes would have done very poorly in regards to cash flow (I'm not worried if the values of the homes dip as l...

Also, getting back to the risk involved - in a SHTF scenario, could I take a huge hit?  Is anyone aware of a period, say, the past 100 years, in the US where owning a bunch of small rental homes would have done very poorly in regards to cash flow (I'm not worried if the values of the homes dip as l...

Also, getting back to the risk involved - in a SHTF scenario, could I take a huge hit?  Is anyone aware of a period, say, the past 100 years, in the US where owning a bunch of small rental homes would have done very poorly in regards to cash flow (I'm not worried if the values of the homes dip as lo...