Sovereign Man is kind of interesting but the doomsday stuff gets old and I think he pushes Chile too hard. For the average guy who doesn't have much money and doesn't have a good grasp on how markets work I would say there isn't much actionable information there. As far as "concrete" information on slowly building investments, that's a tricky one. Most managed money (mutual funds, etc) underperforms the S&P 500, but the S&P 500 is reaching all time highs nearly everyday and a lot of smart people like Hugh Hendry, Kyle Bass, Marc Faber, Jim Rogers and the rest of the ZeroHedgers think the price of the S&P 500 is insanely high and is only that high because of the Quantitative Easing programs, so if the elusive Fed taper ever happens then the S&P 500 will nosedive. The irony is that the S&P 500 potentially nosediving is the very thing that prevents the Fed from tapering or raising interest rates. So the S&P 500 will probably continue to go higher as long as QE continues and in doing so will outperform any mutual fund, but the higher it goes the faster it will drop like a stone if the Fed ever backs off. In this environment there really isn't any passive investment that will give you a safe and dependable yield beyond the 10 year treasury rate. Sure a fund might have a 20% return in 2013 but that's all beta (beta meaning the market return, alpha meaning the return above beta, not the usual context of those words on this forum). A fund that basically tracks the S&P 500 beta return is going to go down with the S&P 500 as much as it goes up, and the increasing Fed inflated S&P 500 gains are at increasing risk of falling hard.
So to put this into something actionable, I'll make a suggestion. It will require some reading on how the S&P 500, ETFs and options work, but you should read up on how this stuff works anyway. If I were you I would buy and hold shares of SPY which is an S&P 500 ETF. I would then sell "bull put spreads" ( http://www.theoptionsguide.com/bull-put-spread.aspx ) that will juice your SPY returns and give you some alpha. I would also buy some way out-of-the-money put options on a rolling basis that will lose money nearly every time and eat into your alpha but they will cover your SPY shares if the S&P 500 implodes, which might happen.
So to put this into something actionable, I'll make a suggestion. It will require some reading on how the S&P 500, ETFs and options work, but you should read up on how this stuff works anyway. If I were you I would buy and hold shares of SPY which is an S&P 500 ETF. I would then sell "bull put spreads" ( http://www.theoptionsguide.com/bull-put-spread.aspx ) that will juice your SPY returns and give you some alpha. I would also buy some way out-of-the-money put options on a rolling basis that will lose money nearly every time and eat into your alpha but they will cover your SPY shares if the S&P 500 implodes, which might happen.