Utilize your financial knowledge, give your answer or opinion to the input question or subject . Answer format is not limited.

Pros/cons for buying gold vs. saving money in an interest-based account?
As Michael McGowan says, just because gold has gone up lots recently does not mean it will continue to go up by the same amount. This plot:  shows that if your father had bought $20,000 in gold 30 years ago, then 10 years ago he would have slightly less than $20,000 to show for it. Compare that with the bubble in real estate in the US:  Update: I was curious about JoeTaxpayer's question: how do US house prices track against US taxpayer's ability to borrow?  To try to answer this, I used the house price data from here, the 30 year fixed mortgages here and the US salary information from here. To calculate the "ability to borrow" I took the US hourly salary information, multiplied by 2000/12 to get a monthly salary. I (completely arbitrarily) assumed that 25 per cent of the monthly salary would be used on mortgage payments.  I then used Excel's "PV" (Present Value) function to calculate the present value of the thirty year fixed rate mortgage. The resulting graph is below.  The correlation coefficient between the two plots is 0.93.  There are so many caveats on what I've done in ~15 minutes, I don't want to list them... but it certainly "gives one furiously to think" !! Update 2:  OK, so even just salary information correlates very well with the house price increases.  And looking at the differences, we can see that perhaps there was a spike or bubble in house prices over and above what might be expected from salary-only or ability-to-borrow.