Basics of buying and selling gold/silver

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. :]

Ditto what Poet said about already having food.  You should take care of the basics FIRST, in my opinion......set up a food, water, and so on, reserve of 6 months to a year before you even think about buying gold and silver.

Then, if you're fortunate enough to have fiat money left over, move it into metals.

1) They will "print". They have been doing that, they are still doing it (operation twist and other stuff), and they will continue. The fed gov can not control spending. I do not see any interest in doing so until after the election. If Obama gets re-elected it will create a very serious situation. If Mitt gets elected you will just have a regular serious situation. Either way the fed gov can no longer manage the financial affairs of the nation in a responsible manner. The fed res is buying up the excess deficit that others are not buying right now. A form of direct monitzation of the deficit. They will continue this or there will be an emergency. The fed res will not allow a Treasury auction to fail. It also can not allow interest rates to go up very much at all. So ZIRP is here to stay for the foreseeable future and so is monitization.

2) Something to consider - If the fed gov cuts spending back to the inbound revenue stream it will cause about an 8% reduction in GDP. This would be considered a major recession. Doing this on top of the current continuing recession would probably result in a depression. Depression being defined as unemployment over 25% and civil unrest as the class of dependency is deprived of its fed gov goodies. Remember the big hoopla with the Tea Party folks with the 2010 midterm election ? Where did that go and where is it now ? It was easy to get up in front of a crowd and say vote for me and I will vote to cut spending. It is not so easy once you understand the result of those spending cuts will be a national emergency and civil unrest.

Now, to silver and gold. If they continuing "printing" and it looks like they will then there is going to be commodity inflation. Look at what QE1 and QE2 did. Ad commodities inflate so will your gold, silver, and other stuff - anything seen as a store of wealth. If there is a move by the people to create an underground economy using gold and silver as a substitute for money the government is going to try to stop that any way they can as it will undermine their ability to collect taxes on that economic activity. First they will declare it illegal unless it is reported and people are not going to report it. Then they will try to take your gold and possibly silver away from you. They are already tracking gold and silver transactions as best they can - especially gold. I recently bought some silver 1 oz engelhard prospectors from a guy at a flea market for cash. I handed him the cash and he handed me the coins. I love that kind of transaction. Clean. If you are buying gold and silver I would be tempted to not store it in some remote location run by a business unless it is outside of the US. If things become difficult the fed gov is going to want your gold and possibly your silver. They may claim it is a national security issue and just take it. It has happened before and it can happen again.