O-Dark-Thirty

My 2016 post ( Why I cancelled the Bauman Letter )  concerning finances and your money seems timeless. This is a comment from Unknown yesterday: HELP. It is August 2020 and everything is crazy. I am scared, but trying hard to remain calm. I have a small/moderate savings and only a small income. Fortunately I have no debts at all. I'm feeling very unsafe right now. I feel certain I should do something but don't know what. At one point I have subscribed to half the services out there. Any direction ??? Thanks. Who knew in January of this year that the world would change so much? Everything is crazy. I know you're scared. I see fear reflected in the eyes of everyone lately. It isn't easy to remain calm, but keep trying. Any kind of savings is noteworthy, and no debt is worth praise. Well done for both of those difficult accomplishments! You have a small income, but look at it differently. You have an income. (I have a small pension, as well, and I'm grateful.) You feel...

I notice that many of my favorite financial institutions are reducing the cost of trades, some even making trades free for now. Though I love to save money, I wonder - why are they doing this? Just as a guess, I think it is because the markets want more investors, and this is a good way to lure people into owning more stocks. It's no secret that I have a low regard for most Financial Newsletters. They prey on cautious and well-meaning people by warning of the coming financial apocalypse. Buy their Newsletters to avoid the imminent tragedy and collapse of Western civilization just by paying them a small fee. I exaggerate, of course. Or possibly I simplify. Do you see the dichotomy? One group shouts warning, the other implies that now is the time to dive into the market. A crisis is coming, but will it be this month? This year? At some point the disaster pundits will be able to say they warned us. Personally, I think there is never a good time to jump ...

My November 2016 post on  Why I cancelled The Bauman Letter  remains my most popular post, with 45 comments to date. I'm not sure why. I simply expressed my disappointment and reasoning about the Bauman newsletter. To be clear, I think that Ted Bauman and his father Robert Baumann are good businessmen and they have a grip on finances. I just believe they have a better grip on their own finances than that of the country. It does not take a financial genius to know our country is heading for a financial crisis. So, yeah, when they tout a "new" newsletter or fan the flames of crisis to entice someone to subscribe to their latest venture - well, I don't find that appealing.  I think you work hard for your money and you deserve to keep it.  If they can turn $5 into $50,000 for you with their newsletter, then why don't they do it for themselves and then give you what you need to know? We should be looking out for our fellow man. I have to be clear on my...

Almost exactly three years ago I posted about cancelling my subscription to the Bauman Letter . That post receives more comments than the rest of my blog combined. Yesterday an Anonymous reader posted the following: Wow Ted Baumann just released a video " Financial Collapse 2019: Insiders Dire Warning About An Unstoppable Economic Collapse " In fact, the YouTube video is posted by Peter Gunther who then goes on to suggest his Forex system is the answer to the coming crash. Most of the people who post comments on the video are not fooled by the sensationalist rhetoric of the post. Still, as most of you know, I do agree that a financial crisis is coming. What shape it takes, none of us really know. Since Nixon disconnected the US dollar from the national gold stores in 1971, our government has been free to print fiat currency at will. Lately, they've done so, to the tune of about $27 million per day. Every day. * The consequences of such reckless behavior wil...

We wrote our book, Preparing for the Fiscal Cliff,  at the end of 2012. At the time the term "Fiscal Cliff" kept popping up in the news, but nobody defined it, so we wrote a short book about what it was and what you could do about it. Since 2012, nothing much has changed in our governmental financial status. Well, not for the better, anyway. Congress - you know, those wonderful guys and gals supposedly working FOR us, the People? - keep kicking the financial can down the road. In July of this year, the government lifted the nation’s debt ceiling and raised the limits on what the the federal government can spend over the next two years. In other words, while most US citizens struggle in their day to day lives, our government decided they could spend more money. I guess they figure it doesn't need to come from anywhere. After all, the Treasury Department can just print more dollars. Here's an aside: Now Mr. Trump just wiped out a few hundred million do...

So I received a newsletter from Stansberry Research written by Porter Stansberry titled Stansberry Research is Leaving the Newsletter Business Forever . Yeah, right. I read the entire newsletter  - all thirty (30) pages of it - and I ended up laughing my butt off. Porter ends this message by inviting people to sign up for his new service, Porter Stansberry For Lifetime (I think - that part was a bit muddled) with, of course, the warning that this was a once-in-a-lifetime-never-gonna-do-it-again offer expiring January 31st. (Yes, I'm late putting this one out, but I wouldn't want you rushing to sign up anyway.) This isn't news, folks. It's another sales pitch, sent to those of us who were subscribers. Is Porter changing his strategy? Sort of. He's now going to offer only the lifetime memberships to his service, which will include his Stansberry Terminal software. The software designed to make you wealthy. Only if you're selling it. His Lifetime m...

I signed up for The Bauman Letter, edited by Ted Bauman and read it for a few months. His father is a well-known member of The Sovereign Society and Ted contributed for years. I like Ted's writing style and read his letter for the nuggets of information I could glean. One month he recommended a company in Australia for holding my gold. If I had a hundred grand in gold, maybe I'd go that route. Then again, maybe I'd bury it in the back yard like the old Romans. I cancelled his newsletter after reading his October issue. Ted posted ten pages of glowing prose for the 1291 Group of the Americas . I was impressed by his report and thought this might be a company I could park my IRA with and not worry about it. (We've been burned by local investment advisors who lost large chunks of our investment and still took their overly fair share of fees, so we're hyper-cautious.) Ted especially praised Erika Nolan, the CEO of this prestigious firm. Ted forgot to menti...

Everyone hates weeding. When we were young, Mom always had a garden. Mom let the ducks wander through her rows of vegetables, though she didn't allow four young boys unfettered access. "Ducks will eat the bugs," she said, "and leave the plants alone." You never know. Four young boys might have eaten bugs, too. When we were old enough to know the difference between the plants and the weeds, Mom sent us out into the garden. You have to exercise good judgement when weeding so you do not pull up the good plants with the weeds. In our garden this spring I was willing to let the weeds grow for a while, so I could more easily distinguish them from the plants that will bear tomatoes, squash, cucumbers and melons. I let them grow too long, because weeds, when left unchecked, will take over a garden. It looks bad.  When I finally did weed, it took a few days, and some of the weeds were so intertwined with the plants that I had to pull good plants up t...

In the last Retire Early post , I went over my formula for determining if you can retire now. If you can, that's great! We'll cover some of the headaches associated with retiring early in a future post. For the rest of you, let's talk about getting ready to retire early. The key to retiring early is saving enough money to do so.   That sounds easy, doesn't it? Some people get jobs that pay well. Some wait to hit it big with the lottery. Just for information, according to statistics, lottery winners declare bankruptcy at twice the national average .  I agree with many of the other experts on early retirement, though. The key to retiring early is to reduce your expenses. Let's look at a breakdown of expenses for a family making $50K a year. Caveat: I believe in supporting my church and the work it does, so I always build a ten percent tithe into my budgets. That's reflected in these numbers. If there are children, some of these numbers mus...