In my post from December 2009, I recommended loading up on silver and gold.  Silver was around $16 per ounce, gold was pushing $1,200.  The Dow Jones was around 10,000.  Now silver is over $30, gold is approaching $1,700, and the Dow is over 12,000.

Oh how I wish I bought more … silver doubled, gold added 50%, and the Dow posted a measly 20% increase.

Both then and now, people still turn on CNN Money and MSNBC and follow the ridiculous advice of the talking heads to buy equities, municipal bonds, and money market funds.  They don’t realize that we’re in a phase of the cycle, during which commodities is king.  This doesn’t mean they will never be overvalued.  It just means that they have not been overvalued in the 2000′s, and they are certainly not overvalued now.

Here’s the good news — people still view precious metals and to some degree equities investing as a lunatic survivalist-hoarder fringe game.  People still don’t hold anything real in their retirement accounts.  People still have no idea how and why to buy physical gold and silver.  This means that there’s still time to jump in and get your hands on some Eagles, Maple Leaves, or, if you are lucky, Koalas, and Kookaburras.

I just placed an order for a couple of rolls of Canadian Mint Maple Leaves because that’s literally the only thing that’s available.  Everyone is out of the Eagles, and I don’t like private mint rounds.  While I can’t predict the future, I know I’ve been right every time I recommended to buy on a dip, so I am sticking to my guns and continuing to invest in precious metals.

How will I know when to sell?  When precious metals investing becomes common knowledge.  When Edward Jones offers IRA silver bullion inside their retirement accounts.  When MSNBC talking heads tell everyone to buy gold and silver.

So I have to be honest … I have no credit cards. I don’t even have an emergency one. My wife and I made a firm decision several years ago to close all of our cards, take our licks on the credit reports, and just move on paying cash for everything. Well, paying with our debit card for everything.

Recently, though, I needed to quickly get a card to move some money from an old student loan that somehow started to accumulate interest. I guess it’s the beauty of not staying on top of the paperwork, or having spam filters enabled, or whatever the hell happened. They just decided to jack up my rate after “contacting me several times”, and I have no time to fight them.

So first I checked out Jon on My Money Blog. He frequently posts about great credit card and balance transfer deals. Then I went to Compare The Market in order to compare credit cards and credit card offers they have available.

Compare The Market allows you to do some pretty nifty comparisons of pretty much anything … from 0% balance transfer offers to home insurance.  The site is clean, fast, and laid out well.  Give them a click!

Just sent a free Evite to our family and friends for our son’s second birthday.  We debated not doing anything at all other than cake at home with just mom, dad, Grandma and Grandpa.  We decided on a birthday party at a free public park with free entertainment in the form of playscapes and learning centers. Scheduling it mid-afternoon, right after nap time, means: no expensive food to buy. A bonus to the public location? No one will bat an eye at the absence of beer. The kids will run around in the fresh air and adults will gossip or take pictures.  No muss, no fuss, no reservation fees or security deposits.  No mediocre-tasting Chucky-Cheese pizza to buy or kid-friendly spread to prepare.  Just cake and ice cream in the park with friends.

We didn’t have the money candy this year so we locked up the house early and trick-or-treated with our toddler in a different neighborhood. This little niche of suburbia really went all out – people openly admitting to spending $200 plus on candy only to have it gone in two hours. Two different houses had their garages tricked out to be haunted houses and one place had rented a bounce house for their front yard! Normally I might feel a tad guilty for getting without giving, but our toddler doesn’t yet understand the trick or treating concept. We could only get him to walk up to 3 front doors and the rest of the time he just kept staring and pointing in excitement at things like a giant Spiderman. (worn by some other kid’s dad of course)

In other news, our recent trip to Ukraine followed by significant water damage to our cabinets and floors has put our family finances severely into the red. We are just starting to make a plan that will get us back to normal. It involves attempting to do enough of the work ourselves that we don’t burn through ALL the insurance money. You know you’re living paycheck to paycheck when you contemplate putting the deductible on credit.

Ugh, I’m frustrated.  I am starting to understand why people ‘hate technology’.

For the longest time I’ve had a Dell XPS laptop sitting under my Panasonic TV, happily playing all my digital content.  We mostly use Hulu Plus, YouTube, Pandora, and whatever I rip to my local home network.  Then I decided to sell it and grab a smaller, dedicated player — lots of companies are coming out with these neat little boxes that supposedly ‘play everything’.

No, no they fucking don’t.

1. PlayOn on Nintendo Wii — a horrible, cruel joke.  The interface sucks, there’s a million menus and sub-menus, you need a computer to stream from, and the quality sucks.  Avoid.

2. Roku — got it to work only on wired LAN, wireless is slow and unreliable.  Patched it, updated it, did everything I could –wifi is intermittent and slow.  Plays Hulu well, but no YouTube channel, and no way to play files off your home network.

3. WD TV Live Player — plays local files, YouTube, and even YouPorn.  No Hulu Plus.  Really?

4. Boxee — trying this thing next.

The Roku is going back to Fry’s.