Don’t be paranoid, either. You’re preparing for the future, not disaster.

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Franklin Sanders’ “Ten Commandments For Buying Gold & Silver” (http://the-moneychanger.com/commandments.phtml):

1. Always take delivery

2. Never buy premium if you can avoid it.

3. Buy bullion for business, numismatics for fun.

4. Buy silver first, then gold.

5. Buy small gold first, then large.

6. Never buy exotic coins or modern rarities or anything you don’t understand.

7. Know your dealer.

8. What governments can’t find, they can’t steal.

9. Never swap bullion coins for U.S. $20 gold pieces.

10. Never break the law.

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Some resources for your consideration:

http://the-moneychanger.com/

http://goldprice.org/

http://goldprice.org/silver-and-gold-prices/

http://silverprice.org/

http://coingallery.com/

And lastly, “Precious Metals for Dummies” just came out this year.

Having a portion of your savings/investment portfiolio — say 10-15% — in physical metals is a good idea, IMHO.

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Who’d have thunk back then that you could get unlimited cell phone usage and free long distance to anywhere in the US for under $100/month?

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Frank: It would still buy $100 worth of stuff!

But seriously, you obviously meant something like “What kind of buying power does $100 have today compared to ten years ago?” And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI Calculator …

http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl

… $100 buys today what $76.34 bought just 10 years ago. IOW, our dollar has lost 25% of its buying power in a mere ten years.

Those greedy corporations … [/sarcasm off]

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http://www.westegg.com/inflation/

I haven’t been out on the road for a couple of days, so I don’t know if gas has reached $4 a gallon here yet [last I saw at the corner station was $3.79], but 2007’s $4 would have been $3.11 in 1998. It would have been $0.52 in 1956, when I started driving [an aside, what cost $4 in 1956 would cost $29.82 in 2007].

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I’ve thought about investing in gold. I’m no financial analyst, but my understanding is that gold maintains a more or less constant purchasing power over time. So buying gold is like “locking in” the dollars you bought it with at their current purchasing power. If the dollar continues to fall, your investment (in dollars) increases, but in purchasing power stays roughly the same. If the dollar rebounds, you’re going to lose money.

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