Goldfinger...my favorite bond movie of all... I have been invested in the PP since 2010 and today is by far the largest draw down that I have personally witnessed. Others may see this decline as a purchasing opportunity, but I am more cautious and will wait until a re-balancing band is triggered. T...

I actually found the gold dive reassuring.  One asset fell nearly 5% in a single day, but the overall portfolio was down less than 1%.  That's a feature, not a bug.  It'll save you the same way when stocks inevitably have a similar day. I think people have a really tough time understanding how volat...

Thanks for the info, Sophie. Very informative.

No need to over think it. I personally simply buy the lagging asset(s) for a few reasons - both practical and psychological. Practical : it's the easiest way to avoid rebalancing events (important in my taxable account) Psychological : always buying low is good mental exercise for me, and keeping th...

My favorite headline today:

Gold Selloff Leaves Traders Wondering
- Gold prices were plummeting by 2% as brokers and analysts attempted to discern why.

Lots of after-the-fact oracles out there. 

From what I can tell, Mint's investment tracking tool doesn't really track personal returns.  It just back-forecasts 18 months what the trend line would have looked like had you always held the same proportions of your investments as you do right now. It's fun to look at to compare the PP to the S&a...

Timely article:

Why Hillary is less ‘inevitable’ than you think
http://freebeacon.com/paper-tigress/

The PP has two flight-to-safety assets and only one prosperity asset. Furthermore, gold is a lot more volatile than stocks are. It's sort of an inherently bearish portfolio more so than it is conservative. Agreed on the observation that lately the portfolio seems to benefit most from bad news.  How...

President Obama’s economic advisers and outside experts say the nation’s much-celebrated housing rebound is leaving too many people behind, including young people looking to buy their first homes and individuals with credit records weakened by the recession. A point I've seen elsewhere is that some...

Chavez tribute.

http://dailypicksandflicks.com/2013/03/ ... vez-video/

I personally always buy the lagging asset(s) just to keep things balanced and minimize fees.  But splitting the money evenly is also perfectly fine.  The most important thing, IMO, is to avoid substituting personal fear or exuberance for an automatic contribution/rebalancing system of your choice.  ...

Honoring Cesar Chavez is fine.  But if Google chooses him over other options on a major holiday, they should not be immune from ridicule for being out of touch.

The printing press did not make everyone a publisher. The cotton gin did not make everyone a textile mill owner. And robots will not make everyone a manufacturer. The utopia of an "evolved" 100% owners class neglects to recognize that all men are not equal. A machine is only as useful as t...

Is this a false choice? If rates drop that low treasuries will have shot though the roof and (presuming you're already in the PP) you'll be selling LTTs rather than buying and you'll naturally be putting any new money into other lagging assets.  If you're planning to sell them all high before rates ...

dualstow wrote: Maybe she's "worth every dime" like one source says in the article. ;-)

The guy who said that is, of course, a fellow county supervisor. 

And people wonder how a wealthy state like California goes bankrupt.

I think the real question is not "what will robot-replaceable people do for money?" but "what will society look like when increasing numbers of people have nothing to offer?" Just a hypothesis -- Like the Bay Area.  When the workforce skews away from manual labor and all the rem...

No need to worry, Budd.  In my experience, it's human nature for people to constantly be looking for ways to optimize investments.  That goes triple for anyone in engineering or finance, as it's how they're hard wired to think (I struggle with this often). You won't find a single investment in the w...

BTW, your portfolio seems well thought out, Desert.  I can't fault you for being concerned about rising rates. Personally, I like the PP/VP distinction for forcing me into quantifying my confidence in my ability to time the market. The more confident I am, the larger the percentage I put in my VP. F...

But when the math consists solely of poorly-fit regressions of past human decisions, even equations are unpredictable. The stock market is a psychological human construction and not a law of nature.

My general advice would be to first try a different type of company (small versus large, etc.) before giving up on the career.  I've seen some folks really thrive after making such a change.  For me, the dissatisfaction runs a bit deeper, as I don't find the work all that interesting and probably s...

Coffee wrote: As for stress free jobs: I always thought that getting a job working at the front desk of a tanning salon would be about as good as it gets.  Especially one in Malibu, California. 

Ha!  Nice.  I'll have to add that to my list.

I'm considering moving my checking account out of Citibank, and am interested in what banks the people here would recommend for convenience, fees, service, and overall safety (FDIC aside, I'd prefer to work with the bank most unlikely to need a bailout from the Feds). I have a Fidelity brokerage acc...

Same boat, Tortoise.  Engineering can wear you out. If your PP can support you for a while, you might consider taking a sabbatical to decompress.  Evaluating new careers is really difficult when you're stressed about the current one.  Here's my working list for things I may want to try once I'm FI e...

For me, the 5th pillar is a mortgage-free home.  Working on that one.

I'm with AgAuMoney -- the pillars are to support the roof.  The career is to fund building them to the needed height and strength. 

Of course, now I also need to work more to afford my nice new mattress.

My favorite comment:

Curled Latin American horse tail is the BEST kind of curled horse tail! Let the other mattress companies cut corners and use cheaper Canadian or Australian horse tail, some of which is UNCURLED, or worse, given a bad perm. If you want the real thing you gotta go to THESE guys!