[technovelist]

Why Euros? Why not Swiss francs? I think the latter has a much better likelihood of maintaining purchasing power than the Euro, which is after all a currency without a single issuer. The Swiss government is far from perfect, but it seems less inclined to do really idiotic things than most of the others, including the ones in the Euro bloc.

[technovelist]

I think your son (and you) will do a lot better if you resist that temptation. Being able to pay the bills and provide an appropriate lifestyle for your child will be much easier if you keep saving money (in a way that won’t lose purchasing power) and wait until the bubble has fully deflated.

[technovelist]

I think you would be much better off paying for private school for your child and continuing to rent an apartment for at least the next three or four years. The housing crash has just started, and buying anywhere in your area in the next 12 months is likely to be a VERY expensive mistake. I think a 50% drop from the highest prices seen so far is a very conservative estimate; 80% or 90% may be more accurate, given the unwinding of the mortgage insanity as well as the other serious economic issues that are going to clobber most people without their having a clue.

There won’t be any hurry in buying after the bottom is in. No one will want to talk about real estate for a long time, which is when you want to buy it.

[technovelist]

Vancouver would probably be at the top of my list for many reasons, although the real estate prices there are also insane. I would still move there, though, and rent for a couple of years until things settle down.

By the way, it isn’t very cold there, unlike most of Canada. I believe the average January low is 32F and the average July high is 82F. They have pretty close to perfect weather, other than the frequent cloud cover, which I imagine could get pretty depressing after awhile.

[technovelist]

Yes, that is a keeper! I wonder what Laura would say if someone told her that the “market price” for a car, or anything else for that matter, was determined by expert opinions rather than by, um, the market? No wonder the government can run such an insane fiscal/monetary policy, with such ignorant citizens!

[technovelist]

Note that this is one of the rare occasions where the seller apparently could sell for the actual current market price without getting killed. But she is going to hold out for “single-digit appreciation” predicted by “experts” instead.

Well, that’s the miracle of the market: she’ll learn her lesson without anyone in particular having to explain it to her. Of course, it is probably going to be a very painful lesson, but that’s life.

[technovelist]

Probably the overall best way to buy Swiss francs is via a Swiss franc annuity issued by a Swiss life insurance company. I have had good service from the one I deal with, although I haven’t taken any of the money out yet; I’m accumulating the interest for my retirement. The interest rate is fairly low, but better than with other Swiss franc investments. It also has good liquidity and low expenses.

[technovelist]

I thought the minimum T-Bill purchase was $10,000. When did they change that?

[technovelist]

Right, and if you choose the dollar and it goes down in value (as it has been doing for the past 100 years or so), the value of your CD goes down as well. Not in dollars, of course, but in real purchasing power terms.

In other words, you can’t avoid risk: you can only choose which types of risks to take.

[technovelist]

1. How and where to buy:

The easiest place to deal with that I’ve found is Kitco. Their web page is Kitco.com, and you can open an account online.

You might want to shop around to see if you can find a much lower price, but I haven’t found that they are often undersold by a significant margin.

2. When to buy:

Now.

[technovelist]

What exactly do you want to know about gold? There are a lot of different ways to consider gold, including:

Why it is a good thing to have in your portfolio
Why governments don’t like it
How to buy it
When to buy it
Where to buy it

and I’m sure I’ve left out a number of others.

If you could be more specific about what you want to know, I can probably provide some links.

[technovelist]

While I agree that this is a time to be very conservative, and that avoiding the stock market is an excellent idea, I don’t agree that one should keep a lot in CD’s or other US dollar-denominated accounts.

The problem is that the dollar is extremely vulnerable to a very large decline, due to the ridiculous trade and budget imbalances, which are closely related to the absurd mortgage and other debt loads in the USA.

So, what to do? Commodities in general are very risky, to be sure, as most of them depend on continued economic expansion in China and the East. However, there is one “commodity” that is different.

I believe a prudent course is to have a significant portion of your net worth in gold. As pointed out by Alan Greenspan (and many others), it is the only money that is acceptable in any circumstance. Every variety of paper “money”, such as the US dollar, has a finite lifespan. Eventually it disappears, taking the wealth of its holders with it. The same is not true of gold, at least in the past 5000 years. That’s a lot better track record than paper.

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