Dry Powder- Where To Put It?

The time horizon point is very important. Glad to see it brought up. Most investors say that a person should have a 3-5 year time horizon as a minimum amount of time for their investments to work. It is unrealistic to invest for the very short term, IMO, because the market can move against us quite suddenly. If it does that just as we need to sell, then we can lose a good chunk of the investment. It is better to be able to choose when you sell an investment and not be forced to sell because you need the money for another purpose.

Pool accounts? Somehow, not sure why, but that is giving me an MF Global moment. Perhaps it is the thought of introducing counter-party risk into an investment that should be designed to eliminate that. Shrug.

IMHO, an alternative to that would be to hold the cash in a local CU account and invest in physical metals with about 3/4 of that in AGEs and 1/4 in ASEs. This presumes that you have fairly secure storage for them, of course. Rather than buy in all at once, you could buy your PMs in stages, say 15-20% per month or so over the next 4-6 months. That could dampen out some of the highs and lows. This should work reasonably well in a market that is not all over the map for prices; some volatility would be dampened by this but not the extreme volatility that can sometimes happen. Not that there is any perfect method of investing that works every time, of course.

A buy that would be close to this in current prices would be a tube of 20 1/2 oz. AGEs and about 12 20-coin tubes of ASEs with some left over for shipping.
Any mix of gold and silver can be selected but you can usually get coins a little cheaper if you buy them in a specific amount, such as a full tube and sometimes even a 1/2 tube. Check the local and on-line vendors for the best prices.

You could also buy into physical silver and gold ETFs, depending on your feelings towards ETFs as safe havens for your money. I can see having some in them but not the bulk of your holdings. I probably have about $20k in 3 metals ETFs and the results have been satisfactory so far. It is very convenient to buy / sell these via a home PC, although there are risks associated with investing in ETFs that do not exist for physical metals holders. I am using diversification of investment type to mitigate some of the risks involved in PM ownership.

As far as real estate I already have my farm paid off, and I've had my fill of tenants. I was looking at ome homes down by my Brother in the Carolinas. You can buy a pretty decent fixer-upper for $25,000, but termites are a hug problem down there as are cockroaches, so I'm a little leary. Good thought though.

Yeah, Hawk. I live in New York near Buffalo and we have only had about 18" of snow all Winter. I love it. Most years we would have had at least six feet by now. I remember one other Winter like this years back that they said was made possible because of El Nino. I don't even care if it's El Diablo, I like it a lot. Here it's the middle of February and we're around 41 degrees today, and all but the deepest drifts are gone. This is one Winter that I would like to repeat itself every year.
Thanks for the advice everybody. I can always count upon solid and varied advice here at the good ol' CC.