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In this video I give you a rundown of a portfolio that I think will hold up in any adverse market collapse. The premise boils down to 3 major equity/asset categories: 1)Energy %25 2)Precious Metals %25 3)Defensive (ie Walmart, JNJ, McD,etc) %50 This is a simple, straight-forward approach to protect your capital and wealth in this tulmultuous time. Part 1: Just a recap, here are the companies I give a green thumb to: Energy: 25% of Portfolio 1) Royal Dutch Shell (RDS.A) 5.5% yield 2) Calumet (CLMT) 10% yield 3) Uranium Participation Corp (URPTF) 0% yield or Cameco Corp (CCJ)...

America is heading into a retirement crisis, an economist says. Most retirees haven't saved enough money to retire and Teresa Ghilarducci blames America's entire system for retiring. It’s been 30 years since the Individual Retirement Account model became the standard way for Americans to save for retirement. But many people who saved for three decades watched a lot of that money disappear during the financial crisis. And now, more than half of American workers have saved less than $25,000 for their golden years, and about 30 percent have saved less than a thousand dollars. Overall, the system is failing, says...

The NFA is collusion with the Banksters, government and judiciary have achieved their goal. The entire concept of "customer segregated funds" is officially, completely, legally dead. Guys, it is OVER. I know that many of you are still cowering in normalcy bias, unable to deal with reality, unable to face the world as it is, but you have GOT to snap out of it. The marketplace is DESTROYED. You CANNOT be in these markets. All legal protections are now officially gone. Do you remember how I told you about the Ponzi scheme that imploded in 2007 called "Sentinel Management Group"...

Two years ago, in January 2010, Zero Hedge wrote "This Is The Government: Your Legal Right To Redeem Your Money Market Account Has Been Denied" which became one of our most read stories of the year. The reason? Perhaps something to do with an implicit attempt at capital controls by the government on one of the primary forms of cash aggregation available: $2.7 trillion in US money market funds. The proximal catalyst back then were new proposed regulations seeking to pull one of these three core pillars (these being no volatility, instantaneous liquidity, and redeemability) from the foundation of the...

Here is some good news from the Center for Disease Control: by 2050, life expectancy in the U.S. will be 87.5 years.  Or at least we thought this was good news. According to a Northwestern Mutual study, it turns out that only 56 percent of American are financially prepared to live to age 75, and even fewer are prepared to live to 85 or 95. Women are expected to live even longer than men but they're even more in danger of outliving their finances. In fact, only 45 percent of those surveyed have any plan regarding their financial life, down from...

Duplicity: More than 30 years ago, lawmakers made a deal with Americans: Set up a retirement nest egg and we'll let you fill it with tax-free money. A financially troubled Washington now plans to break its word. Nothing brought ordinary Americans into the world of investing like 401(k)s. Named after a subsection of the Internal Revenue Code, these retirement savings accounts have become a wildly popular alternative to traditional employer pensions, and are today owned by a sizeable majority of Americans at or near retirement. Through 401(k)s, an employee — not the company he or she works for — decides...

Per Stuart Varney, the "Government" is considering ways to tax some or all of your 401K to raise approximately $462M. This would be a new tax on top of whatever taxes you would already owe. Interesting.

Uncle Sam, in a desperate attempt to fix its $16 trillion-plus deficit, is leering over Americans’ retirement nest egg as its new bailout fund. Capitol Hill politicians are assessing tax changes that could let the Internal Revenue Service lay claim to a portion of the $18 trillion sitting in 401(k) accounts and other tax breaks used by middle-class workers, including cutting the mortgage tax deduction. A commission looking for ways to close the deficit, and, noting the extent of 401(k) tax breaks, recommends an examination of the system as one way to prevent government bankruptcy. Besides 401(k)s, other possibilities include...

Uncle Sam, in a desperate attempt to fix its $16 trillion-plus deficit, is leering over Americans’ retirement nest egg as its new bailout fund. Capitol Hill politicians are assessing tax changes that could let the Internal Revenue Service lay claim to a portion of the $18 trillion sitting in 401(k) accounts and other tax breaks used by middle-class workers, including cutting the mortgage tax deduction.

As growing numbers of baby boomers face retirement with inadequate savings, some state officials are considering a novel proposal to rebuild America’s ailing retirement system — having state pension funds run retirement plans for companies. Because more companies are ditching their own pension plans or not offering retirement benefits at all, the idea would be to give companies a way to offer a firm pension without having to run the plan themselves. On Monday, the labor economist Teresa Ghilarducci, who developed the proposal, held a public forum at the New School for Social Research with New York City’s comptroller, John...

(Reuters) - Will the baby boomers be the only generation to retire with 401(k) plans? It could happen. Last week many of the nation's biggest thinkers on retirement got together in a Senate hearing room to discuss the future of pensions and retirement. There were representatives of unions, employers, financial services providers, government agencies and consumer groups. And the only thing they all seemed to agree on was this: The 401(k) plan has been sort of a failure. Those are strong words, and probably overstate the case. Current and future retirees now have some $4.3 trillion for retirement that wouldn't...

In between the happiness of Christmas and the promise of the New Year, permit me to introduce a sour note, a hint of a scold. If you're like, well, almost everybody, you're not saving enough. 15% of each paycheck into the 401(k) is the bare minimum you can get away with, not some aspirational level you can maybe hope to hit someday when you don't have all these problems. I mean, obviously if one out of two workers in your household just lost their job, or has been stricken with some horrid cancer requiring all sorts of ancillary expenses, then...

Ted Benna, who three decades ago seized on an IRS loophole to transform American retirement savings, says he’s proud to be “father of the 401(k).” He also thinks he created a monster. ... “I would blow up the system and restart with something totally different,” he told SmartMoney.com. “Blowing up the existing structures is the only way we can simplify them.”

The story is about growing scandal in the banking industry centered around banks allegedly overcharging pension funds for currency transactions. The man who uncovered the alleged scam, Harry Markopolos, expects all 50 states to eventually join the suit. If the name sounds familiar that's because Markopolos was a whistleblower on the Madoff Ponzi scheme, only to have his claims ignored by the SEC for the better par of a decade.

If you didn’t know anything about the stock market before October 4, you’d think the US had the strongest economy ever.  The Dow rallied more than 1,220 points since then - a gain of 12%! Naturally, the uninformed investor may think it’s time to jump into this bull market. However, thousands of investors are waking up to the reality of Wall Street - that it’s become more of a Vegas gamble than an investment based on fundamentals. Nothing is backing this latest rally, except for a few headlines swaying public sentiment. When the media announces that Europe has found a...

s your 401(k) safe from the tax man? That's a question that might be worth asking, as the congressional "supercommittee" scrambles to find $1.5 trillion in additional deficit cuts. In September, the Senate Finance Committee held a little-noticed hearing that explored changes to retirement plans — principally employer-sponsored 401(k)s — that would in one way or another cut their tax deductions. The tax breaks' size makes them a tempting target for lawmakers. According to the White House budget office, tax exemptions for 401(k)s and IRAs will "cost" the government more than $436 billion over the next five years. Senate Finance...

In the coming weeks, Americans could face sweeping changes to the tax deferral status and funding strategies of their retirement plans.

[snip] On Thursday, the U.S. Senate Finance committee will listen to proposals from a range of interests. On the table are such ideas as revamping the tax treatment of 401(k) plans to make the system more automatic, and possibly adding caps to make contributions less tax-favorable to higher-income workers. The hearing comes as the so-called retirement deficient Income, the gap between the pension and retirement plans Americans have today and what is necessary to maintain living standards, is at a high of $6.6 trillion, according to the Retirement Research Center. "Fewer than half of the working public currently have access...

I am 26 and recently graduated from school. For the past almost 2 years I have been running a 401k with the tiny percentage of money I can afford to put into it with the full expectation that Social Security won't be around when I'm eligible for it, regardless of the fact I've had to pay into it. I find it really scary how many people I know around my age that aren't saving at all. At first my work only offered a regular 401 so I put in slightly above the % for employer matching. Then they offerred a...

When President Obama provides his roadmap for saving the economy, he needs to explain why it is bad to privatize Social Security but good to privatize military retirement, changing it from a government pension plan to a 401(k) investment program. And if this really is the key to economic solvency in the retirement system, then why not privatize Social Security as well? When things aren't broken, don't fix them. The all-volunteer military system still attracts some of our finest young people even though we have been at war for ten years. If a change to 401(k)s is a good idea,...