Most of us don’t like the idea of the federal government and the politicians that run it being in control of our retirement funds. That’s why we put money into vehicles such as 401ks, Roth IRAs, IRAs, etc., to ensure that there will be cash available when we are too old to work. Unfortunately, there is some indication that some politicians would like to seize or take control of tax-deferred retirement plans and divert the money to their pet projects. Naturally, many of you are wondering if there are alternatives to 401ks, where you can
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People across the globe are losing faith in traditional national currencies. In Europe, this spurred the creation of the Euro and now the popularity of digital currencies such as Bitcoin. In the United States, it is fueling renewed interest in the use of gold or silver coins as currency. The most interesting experiment is going on in Texas, where Governor Rick Perry (who is hardly a libertarian) is pushing an effort to create a Texas Gold Depository. This proposal wouldn’t create a gold currency; instead it would create what amounts to a sort of exchange-traded
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The volatile ups and downs in the market prices of precious metals read like a soap opera. It begins with the Federal Reserve—they confirmed they had every intention of continuing quantitative easing for the foreseeable future (to the point that those of us in the financial sector now refer to it as QE infinity, as
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Have you ever wondered what you might do if your income suddenly disappeared? Maybe it’s happened to you. Our economy is volatile, folks, and hard times could very well be just around the corner. When it comes to making a living, hard times do present opportunities, and you don’t have to have a lot of money to start making money right now. After twenty-eight years in the newspaper business, my livelihood was taken away from me not long ago. Newspapers were dying everywhere, and the profession I gave my life to was no longer needed. Below
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The so-called fiscal crisis in Washington is nothing but politics. Even though Congress and President Obama claim that the country is out of money, politicians on both sides of the aisle seem to be able to come up with money for pet projects. An investigation by Senate Republicans found that the Labor Department had enough funds to spare to promote unions and collective bargaining overseas. Republicans learned that the Department had given $2.2 million to the Solidarity Center (an AFL-CIO organization set up during the Cold War to help workers in Communist countries) to promote
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One basic economic survival skill that everybody needs to master in today’s world is the ability to function in today’s economy without a bank account. Everybody needs to do this because it is entirely possible that you will find yourself without a bank account in the near future. There are several reasons why you need to seriously consider the possibility of not having a bank account. Changes in the banking industry make it harder for working people to get or keep bank accounts. The growing number of fees attached to bank accounts often makes it
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The media is once against trumpeting real estate and claiming that rising real estate prices are a sign of recovery. Are the commentators correct, or is the so-called increase in real estate prices simply hype designed to make a terrible economy look better? The frightening answer is that the real estate recovery looks like a bubble designed to create an illusion of recovery. Worse, speculators are manipulating it in order to line their own pockets at average people’s expenses again. Is the Real Estate Recovery a Fraud? Some recent news stories indicate that the rise
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The key to your family’s financial survival is your assets, namely your money and your property. Therefore, protecting your assets must be one of your family’s top survival priorities. Unfortunately, many preppers put far more thought and effort into physical survival (storing food, etc.) than into protecting assets, even though protecting them is often just as important. There are two major threats to your family’s assets in today’s world: confiscation and inflation. Confiscation means that government will try to seize all or part of your funds through taxes or simply by taking it. Confiscation isn’t
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The Social Security Trust Fund should be solvent and able to continue to pay all benefits (including cost-of-living adjustments each year), except for the fact that although everyone paid into the trust fund with every paycheck and their employers had to match it, Congress stole, pilfered, plundered, and embezzled it all. The term “trust fund”
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The market has proven that gold is not the ideal investment that some people thought it was. The precious metal lost around $230 in value in the April 12 and 15 trading sessions. It rallied slightly on April 16, but its price of $1,386.50 a troy ounce was still a far cry from the $1,787 an ounce the metal was trading at in September. So what’s going on here? Is it a complete collapse of the gold bubble or simply the market correcting to a more realistic price? That question will be difficult to answer
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