Personal Finance

One in six investors chose gold as the best place to park money they wouldn't need for more than ten years – the same number that chose stocks, according to a recent Bankrate survey. Another 6% chose bonds, while 25% chose real estate, and 23% said they would simply bank the money.

What impact will the elections have on your financial future? Well, frankly, regardless of which side of the political fence you stand on, the prospects of your retirement are much more likely to be impacted by your personal actions than by the actions of Washington politicians.

There has been a proliferation of so-called citizenship-by-investment or economic citizenship programs that allow individuals from all over the world to legitimately acquire passports and more and more countries have joined the game. Below are the terms and conditions, by country, for acquiring such a passport.

Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor is one of a handful of books you hear mentioned over and over again when you ask investors to name the best investing books of all-time. Graham was far ahead of his time in talking about investor behavior and human psychology in terms of the role they play in shaping how markets and investors generally work. Let me explain.

As the narrative goes, either we buy into the unlimited and more or less guaranteed creation of wealth for all who follow the agreed-upon wisdom, or we reject it, and prepare for the inevitable collapse of the financial system and the value of money. The problem, however, is that both the present and the recent past are completely different from either approach BUT there is a third potential future to consider which I believe to be the most compelling. Let me explain.

We've now entered a pivotal phase in which, with each passing day, more and more of the country's 50 million Baby Boomers are reaching retirement age. Over the last 35 years, we’ve seen what the largest and wealthiest generation can to do the markets when most of them are simultaneously buying – but we have no history for what happens to prices when so many people try to cash out so much for so long.

I'm bulled up on gold. [I think it] could rally by 50%. Here's why.

It does not matter if stocks are insanely overvalued as long as there's a foolish participant who is willing to pay a higher price. That's the essence of the "greater fool theory" and, right now, there are more foolish buyers who want "in the game" than risk-reducing sellers who want to scale back.

It should be evident that one need not be a so-called Wall Street expert to make a self-determination about what to do in the markets and when. The information is always available in real-time, and in our mind the logic is inescapable when one begins to apply a little (or a lot of) common sense to what the market is revealing.

Have you ever heard the statement, perspective is everything? Well with money, it’s no different. Looking through the foggy lens of dollar money you will get a distorted and unclear vision of the world and its affairs. Walking through life with foggy dollar lenses could lead to a very bumpy ride. Looking through the lens of gold, however, will bring precision and clarity...