I put flotation devices and a hammer in the car cockpit today.

Hey, why not resurrect a really old thread? It's relevant  ;) I have been through a hairball of a year, and I have tons of cash lying around. I'm going to push it into a taxable account PP, therefore spendable but I want to keep more than like 36% in cash, rest divided evenly equity / gold / bonds. ...

Goes back to the paper/digital nature of trading.  Too easy to get in/out at low or high points based on emotions, latest trend, tips, etc. Physical gold in hand is MUCH harder to part with! Also, to be fair, if you have move from one mutual fund into another one with a substantially similar philos...

Thanks, rickb.

I asked some preppers on a prepper GooglePlus community if they thought gold was of any use for SHTF, and they replied NO . I've thought it may be OK to have some 1 oz American Eagle silver coins, though... something between a $10-$20 bill, that's a decent denomination, and a well-known issue. So wh...

You know, back when I started mutual fund investing in the 1980s, there was no way to easily, painless know how much your funds were up or down, moment by moment. I looked at it every quarter. If that often. The information deluge today makes it much harder and more painful to be in any investment p...

Statins have made a huge positive difference for me in terms of NAFLD (non-alcoholic fatty liver disease). I went from having NAFLD to not having NAFLD in a couple of years, by losing a bit of weight, taking Vitamin E, and a statin. Obviously, I can't tease apart which one helped, and how much it he...

I tend to agree.  The VP isn't a serious mechanism unless you're going to be professional with it.  And unless you're going to be a professional with it, you're unlikely to want to do all the hard work required to be a success.  Chicken and egg. That's why I'm trying the robot out. The robot never ...

barrett wrote: Ochotona, why did your parents leave China if they didn't have assets? If you don't mind answering, of course.

They were on the losing side, like the South Vietnamese 26 years later.

Limit buy orders placed between $850 - $1000 per ounce.

Investors will generally get better results (returns) with the Permanent Portfolio, and that is true for people of any age. If they stay in it. That's a problem for GAA portfolios also. I was just remarking that Dad (specifically me ) would bark at my kids to stay in their portfolios when they are ...

Tyler wrote: BTW, back to back real returns of -21% in 1973 and -29% in 1974 is precisely the type of scenario that will cause very rational people to ditch a perfectly good investment plan right out of the gate.

That's when Dad barks at Junior(s) to stay in the program.

And the CAGR of the PP is quite impressive in its own right (trailing a 60/40 portfolio by only 0.18%/year over the past 40+ years), so for me it is an excellent accumulation portfolio as well. I think I missed that memo! I just ran 60/40 vs. PP on PortfolioVisualizer.com, and got a 1.58% differenc...

The Buffalo Bayou came out of its banks and flooded the below-grade parking lot of our building on Woodway Drive. But it's going down now.

Just for reference, I'm not talking about juggling a PP and a 100% stock portfolio... I'm talking about a PP and a 60/40-ish portfolio. The 60/40 portfolios I have contain sectors that the PP just doesn't have represented at all, so in a sense it's yet another type of diversification. I am a firm be...

Sitting around the dinner table with my brother and our aging parents yesterday on Memorial Day continues to bring this damn effing subject to the forefront for me all the time, i.e. financial security in retirement and how to get there, and I was completely sick and tired of devoting time to it, h...

This will sound harsh, but is this an unintended consequence of modern medical technology, the discovery of antibiotics, and perhaps even effective birth control methods? ... Mountaineer I don't think so, because at some point the population has to stop growing anyway. We can argue over that number...

It Bogles the mind

As far as evacuations across borders goes, my parents didn't have that to worry about when they left China in 1949, as they were penniless. But the way modern customs services are now, I would say it would be quite hard to smuggle physical assets like gold across international borders at heavily sec...

I personally find the PP/VP approach a bit weird, though I get why HB developed the method. However, at the end of the day it is a bit of a rhetorical ruse. One only has a single bucket of assets and together they have a historical expected return and risk profile. At a macro personal level that is...

I am not sure the when to take SocSec question has been settled. The less solvent the system is, the more I want to take it early. Recent news hasn't been good.

Tyler wrote: ....racking up consumer debt, putting away the standard 10% in a 401k, and betting it all on stocks.

Wow, when did I say that? Did I say it on the alternative universe gyroscopic forum?

Hi I understand your concern about funding retirement in a low-yield world. However stock market's don't always go up plus they are absolutely unpredictable. You want to beat average market returns of PP by investing in more of an extreme fashion. You could end up losing more money instead of makin...

There are a couple of conflicting thoughts on this forum about the PP; some advocate that a PP is sufficient for every phase of life, others think that a PP is a low volatility, moderate return portfolio that may be inappropriate for a younger person early in the accumulation phase of life, and they...

Just a general question     At retirement, what part of the 4 x25 does one draw from?  Sorry if this is a stupid question Wouldn't it make sense to rank the four assets by performance since the last re-balance, and preferentially harvest the one that grew the most? (or, as it might be this year, sh...