I know I know, it’s been forever since I’ve posted anything… I’ve been completely consumed by various things including selling our old house, working on a project for a client and life in general. It seems I’ve gotten out of the habit of posting (or gotten into the habit of NOT posting) and have ignored you all for too long (again)… For this I apologize.

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I’ve been interested in purchasing a small amount of physical gold for our portfolio and trying to find ways to do so cheaply. The spreads and commissions from many gold dealers is higher than I like and the premium you have to pay for coins just doesn’t make sense to me. My reason for wanting to own gold are two-fold.

1) Gold is an inflation hedge/hedge against the falling dollar - over time, it’s value in real dollar terms remains pretty much constant. That being said, the price does fluctuate, sometimes dramatically.
2) Gold peaked in 1983 at a bit over $800 per ounce. If you were to adjust that price to today’s dollar it would be around $1,800, or nearly 3 times what it is worth today.

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I’m not normally the doom and gloom type but what I’ve been reading about subprime mortgage debt has me a bit concerned… I don’t know what will happen but one possibility is laid out below.

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It has been a while since I posted that I was pulling out of Prosper. I still see no reason to continue investing in this vehicle.

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For the last several months my interactions with Prosper have gone something like this:

• Log into Prosper
• Shake head at the growing number of late payments on my various loans
• See that I have enough cash to make a new loan
• Search through loan requests and either a) not find any I like or b) find one or two I like, make a bid then get outbid before the loan closes.

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Got an email this morning from HSBC. Their Online savings account is now offering 6% interest on new money (meaning anything above your balance as of the close of business last Friday) until April 30. Looks like it’s time for me to do my credit card application/balance transfer spree…

According to a Yahoo Group I’m subscribed to, Prosper recently completed the sale of the first batch of bad debts to a collection agency. What this means is that a group of loans that were many months past-due have been sold to a debt collection agency for some number of pennies on the dollar.

None of my loans were sold so I can’t speak from any personal experience. I would have liked to have seen what the percentage recovered was though, would help plan for what my expected return will be.

I logged into Prosper today for the first time in a few weeks to see how things were going and if I had enough cash balance to fund another loan.

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My Investment Experiment this year proved to be an expensive learning experience. While I have a few winners and a load of experience under my belt I made some costly mistakes.

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Apologies for not having this up first thing in the morning. There were a lot more submissions to go through than I expected…

Anyway, without further ado, I present the 80th installment of the Carnival of Personal Finance! I’ll be reading through the submissions I haven’t already today and moving the catagories or deleting irrelevant posts. If you find any problems, please contact me.

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