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In writing about household debt, as I often do, I sometimes feel a bit like Tom Wolfe writing the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test: I’m trying to capture the character of a strange phenomenon while not myself taking part in it.

Throughout my adult life, I have avoided taking on debt as much as possible and have always repaid it on or ahead of schedule. This does not come from any sort of financial virtuousness, but just from observing at a fairly early age what a misery debt can make of people’s lives.

Aside from the need to work, toil and slave to salt away one or two million bucks or more, there’s one thing that has long ticked me off about the whole topic of retirement planning — the single-minded focus on accumulation.

Entire libraries could be filled with the books, newspaper pieces, magazine articles, DVDs and CDs devoted to the why, how, when and where to stockpile assets for retirement. (And that’s just counting the stuff from Suze Orman!)

But almost no one focuses on the spending of those assets. There’s no overlooking that oversight, no selling short the impact of that shortcoming. Assuming retirees’ cash reserves will be finite when they saunter off into the sunset, and for most of us they will, wouldn’t it really be kind of nice if we actually knew how much we could safely spend in each of our glittering golden years?

This post comes from Keith Guyot at our partner site Zing.

Gold prices fell more than 25% from January 2013 to January 2014, according to Goldprices.org. Silver was down nearly 36% in that same time period. Meanwhile the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet ballooned from $3 trillion to $4 trillion in 2013, and has grown nearly fivefold since the beginning of the recession in 2008.

Myriad Federal Reserve policies have come and gone in the past decade. A vast majority of them either had no effect on precious metal prices or positively influenced them. It was late May 2013 when the Federal Open Market Committee began hinting it would taper QE3. The precious metal market reacted to the news accordingly, with gold rising from about $1,192 per ounce in June to nearly $1,400 by July.

To my way of thinking, putting your money behind the Bitcoin represents a bet rather than an investment. Of course, the distinction can be confusing — outside of sports pages, the place you might most often see people referring to bets is in the financial news. Any large or prominent financial stake in something is likely to be referred to as a bet.

I believe there is an important difference between a reasoned assumption of risk (i.e., an investment) and an all-out win-or-lose gamble (i.e., a bet). With each passing year, I appreciate that distinction more and more because I’ve seen people put their money at undue risk when they mistake a bet for an investment.