You still have not made a bad investment. Since you own physical coins you haven't lost that much. Street value for those are still $40. How would you like to own a stock that went to zero with zero chance of coming back? With physical metals that is impossible. If you owned the Dow 30 stocks since the "Great Depression" every one of them has gone to zero except for GE that got a bailout. They just keep on switching them out to make the number climb. Have you heard about Greece? If you owned Greece Drachma (their currency) right now you just lost half your buying power. If Greece is kicked off the Euro they are toast. Given time, every paper has gone to zero.
Gold & silver haven't even fallen to their 100 day moving average. Think of investing like a boat when everyone is freaking-out & running to one side of the boat, you want to be the only one running to the other side of the boat. We just had a situation where to many people bailed on the US dollar to fast. Now the crowd ran back into US dollars. Guess where you should now start running. It is hard to gather the courage to run against the crowd, but that is where the money is.
Silver sliced through it's 100 day moving average, I believe. I think it bounced off the 125 day MA but I'm not at my BBerg so I can't confirm.
Though I do think the bull market in PMs has more to go, I think it will end very badly. I think gold and silver will fall 70%-90% when the bubble collapses. Now that might be in 2016 after gold has hit $4000, I don't know. But people will lose a lot of money.
I don't like to look over generations when thinking about individual' time horizon. The bulk of an individual's investment time horizon occurs over 20-30 years. Gold fell from $850 to $250 in 18 years. People putting the bulk of their savings into gold during that time, expecting to retire in 20 years saw tremendous wealth destruction.