I'm going to answer your question in an informal manner, so hope everyone can forgive my lack of care in my writing! For your first question, it depends on whether you are keeping your PMs personally at hand or keeping your PMs in a private holding/vault. If you personally hold onto your PMs then you can either sell them coin dealers,pawn shops, jewelers, or sell and ship to a larger PM dealer, such as APMEX, Kitco, etc. Assuming you are selling them during stage three of the bull market, I'm quite sure you won't have much trouble selling your metals to a dealer as prices continue to climb. In terms of time, it will of course depend on whether you want to sell to local shops that will likely offer you below spot price or ship the PMs to larger companies that will offer you around spot price, taking around a week or two to ship and receive a check.
Now if you are a person investing a larger amount of money into PMs I'm assuming you would using a holdings account to keep that large sum of capital secure! I personally trust goldmoney out of all of the third party vaults for various reasons including the fact that Chris Martenson, my own economics professor, and many reknowned economists support goldmoney. Also using a facility like goldmoney which is outside the US, prevents the government from confiscating your gold, since it is outside US borders :]. When using a holding account from a place like goldmoney, you can sell your PMs for cash instantly and have the money wired to your bank account. Overall if you are holding only a few thousands of dollars in PMs and believe you can keep it safe, then keep them at hand, otherwise store them in a third party vault. Although you will end up paying a storage fee, you mitigate the risk of losing or being robbed of your PMs.
As for your second question, it is indeed a confusing topic, there are three major situations that may arise during this bull market. The first situation is that if we're lucky, the government will finally put its spending, debt, and inflation problems under control, meaning we will all be able to safely cash out on our PMs (hopefully not selling for lower than the total costs) and hopefully rebuild the economy. The second possible situation is that governments will be forced to return to the gold standard in order to bring spending and inflation under control as well as restore trust in the currency. Under these circumstances, the government may confiscate your gold like FDR did or the gold prices will adjust to the money supply, and you will be able to exchange your gold for paper from the government. If government does not make these two better choices, the economy will go into chaos as the currency collapses, returning us to a barter economy which is impossible to live by in our society, though the people with PMs will have the comparative advantage through having a medium of exchange. I believe Jim Rickards has written about these possibilities as well or at least spoken about these if I remember correctly.
For that last little point about how we would buy bread with gold and silver under these circumstances, we will either be using fiat money for a while longer, our gold will exchanged for paper, or if we do revert to barter economy, you will literally spend your gold and silver to buy the bread by weight as civilization did before paper money. I hope the things I have written here have been of some help to you and forgive me for the poor writing, I had just decided to respond to this post seeing that your question had not been answered for eight hours. Well anyways feel free to ask more questions and I'm sure the community here will gladly assist you. :]
I am very new to this topic, so please forgive me if the question is too easy/obvious. Here's my dilemma. I understand that I have to defend myself against loss of value of the fiat currency. I also understand that gold and silver are good candidates to do that. I also have a basic idea of how to buy gold or silver, I do believe the book has some links. My problem is what to do with the gold or silver once I buy them. I'm worried about two main scenarios. First, what if I need to convert it back to money before the crash. How easy is it to do? Does it take hours, days, weeks? Second scenario is what to do with it after the crash? I know, this part is not that easy to answer, because nobody knows how it will play out. But what are the major options? If I have gold or silver, how can I get bread for example? Of course, if all of these have been answered already, a link would be greatly appreciated. Thanks: Tamas