I'm new here and new to investing. Not young though, and need advice / help. Not sure if I need to go and hire an advisor, but figured I'll ask here since PP seems like something I believe in and reading the forum shows the wealth of knowledge of members.
Here is my situation. I'm from Canada, I'm 40, family, 2 young kids. Over past 6-7 years we had a single income, expenses are rising as kids grow. Have been really influenced by some friends who are believers of things going to be real bad. I'm into politics, which really supports the negative outlook, but at this time I'm just tired of being negative and came to painful realization that I'm wasting time and opportunities. Most likely I've missed the biggest life opportunities for investing, but worrying about the past is pointless - need to do something about the future.
I've got quite a lot of precious metals, physical in hand as well as physical in storage abroad (gold and sliver). I've got some cash, which is sitting in a savings account, making a bit of money, which is being taxed. In Canada we've got couple of ways for tax free savings - RRSP (analog of 401K in the US) and TFSA (max $5500/year to contribute, no tax on withdrawal).
My questions:
- I don't want my cash just be sitting in a savings account. Having it in a PP and being tax free seems like a much better idea. However I then should not be expecting any withdrawals in case I need money. What would be your advice:
- create a portfolio while leaving part of my cash amount outside in case I need that and using only part of what I've got?
- keep cash portion of PP outside of investment account (and just keep it in cash, savings, some other form)? In case I need money and use what I've got, i'm really screwing my PP.
- Should I keep full portfolio to a single investment account to avoid issues when rebalancing? If I have one for me, one for my wife - should I then have fully separate portfolios? If both of us have TFSA and RRSP (see above) - that becomes 4 accounts and there are issues with transferring fund between.
- When starting up - should I gradually get into it, eg. every month/quarter buy 20K worth of PP (5K for each part)? Or do you think it's better to do it all at once or over 2-3 purchases?
- How do you guys deal with physical gold in the portfolio? It is becoming quite painful / costly to sell/purchase gold with all the fees associated with that.
- My ratio is about 1/3 of gold and 2/3 of cash that I've got altogether. So, really heavy on gold.
- should I sell off most of it and buy other parts of PP (or GB) to get to 25/25/25/25 allocation right away?
- should I gradually be selling it off and buying other parts of PP (or GB)?
- should I just be very inbalanced for a while, adding to other three, while keeping all of the gold, trying to get to proper allocation ratio?
Thanks!