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 ...

Are you saying he didn't recommend buying "lagging assets"? I hear people talk about doing that and it makes me wonder if that is the best strategy. I can see it if you think the lagging asset is approaching the bottom but if it's still on the way down it doesn't strike me as a particular...

Although I could see the LTT market being very volatile for a while going forward, it is very difficult for me to think that US Treasuries are in a bubble.  That market simply lacks the characteristic mania.   Most people don't even know how to buy bonds (we had to post a tutorial on this very webs...

For the deflationists: what do you make of the fact that prices aren't actually falling but rising ?  For the inflationists:  what to make of record low yields on LT bonds ? Great questions.  I wonder the same things. Everything has a price, including safety. In this case, I think what we might be ...

I think that MT is right on when he says that the LT bond game becomes a game of ping pong at the very low yields.  I just wish that I had ever seen the Permanent Portfolio play such a game of ping-pong before so that I could say definitively whether or not "it got game".  :) Oh, it got g...

If adhering to the HBPP, we should not consider max upside and max downside.  That, to me, would be market timing.  Re-balancing to take profits when LTT yields fall and prices rise should be all we need to do. In order for a 25% LTT allocation to hit a 35% rebalancing band, LTTs have to rise in pr...

If adhering to the HBPP, we should not consider max upside and max downside.  That, to me, would be market timing.  Re-balancing to take profits when LTT yields fall and prices rise should be all we need to do. In order for a 25% LTT allocation to hit a 35% rebalancing band, LTTs have to rise in pr...

MT and Craig have mentioned the increased volatility of LTTs at low yields, which is good in a sense since the PP thrives on volatility, but that's only the bright side. There's also a dark side to low LTT yields: ever-shrinking maximum upside and ever-growing maximum downside. If we assume, for the...

In 10 or 20 years the games will be so realistic that a large percentage of the population will retreat into digital universes and leave the rest of us to keep the lights on.  If a sufficiently advanced population created robots that could do most real world tasks for us, we could theoretically all...

But even with replicators, and vast energy stores, and no more greed or self-interest, something that's been bugging me is how they manage to coordinate the production of things like starships and space stations without money. Even if I accept that the project managers have transcended self-interes...

At lower yields, long dated treasury's are likely to be more volatile, and potentially zigzag around in price more wildly than at higher yield levels... Is there a good explanation for that effect, other than based on what has happened in the past? I double-checked this using Yahoo Finance data for...

* That forced education of kids is primarily done to keep them out of the workforce, and is a big waste of time, because people really only learn what the *want* to learn. I haven't read either book, but the former part of the claim above seems highly unlikely given the specific intentions of the P...

I have never used MySpace, but I was an early user of Facebook.  I think what made Facebook successful was its limited access during its early years.  You had to have an e-mail address at one of the approved Universities before you could open a Facebook account.  This gave it a sense of being speci...