A Gold IRA is the name commonly used for any Individual Retirement Account (IRA) set up to allow the addition of gold / precious metals to the account.

Gold IRA’s do not necessarily only contain gold or precious metals – the can include any IRS permissible investment from real estate to paper assets.

However most of the time when you see Gold IRAs mentioned on bullion and coin dealer websites, these will be specifically for gold and silver investments, with many also offering palladium and platinum as required.

Any asset classes in a retirement account can be adversely affected by forces outwith your control at any time. Accounts can lose value for a wide variety of reasons from market crashes and recessions to political instability and war.

By balancing your portfolio you will typically limit your overall risk. This is because it’s unlikely that any crisis will affect all your investments at once – in fact Gold is regularly used to balance portfolios for the very reason that it traditionally performs strongly when other assets crash.

A gold IRA can also allow precious metals to be bought in a tax-advantaged way either seeing significant tax savings at time of purchase or time of sale depending on whether the account is a Regular or a Roth IRA.

To benefit from the tax-advantaged treatment offered with an IRA, purchased metals must meet specific purity and quality standards, and must be manufactured at approved facilities.

The following is a list of currently accepted precious metals products, both on the official IRS list and other permissible products:

IRA Approved Bullion Coins & Rounds

IRA Approved Bullion Bars

IRA approved bullion bars must meet minimum fineness requirements and be manufactured by a NYMEX or COMEX-approved refiner/assayer and should be ISO9001 Certified.

Gold bars .995+ fine that are accredited by COMEX/NYMEX / ISO9001 Certified

Examples of qualifying gold bars are:
Perth Mint .9999 fine bars
Credit Suisse .9999 fine bars
PAMP Suisse .9999 fine bars
Royal Canadian Mint .9999 fine bars
Ohio Precious Metals .9999 fine bars

Silver bars .999+ fine that are accredited by COMEX/NYMEX / ISO9001 Certified
Examples of qualifying silver bars are:
Royal Canadian Mint .9999 fine bars
Sunshine Mint .999+ fine bars
Ohio Precious Metals .999+ fine bars
Engelhard Hand Poured .999+ fine bars
Golden State Mint ISO9001 .999+ fine bars

Platinum bars .9995+ fine that are accredited by COMEX/NYMEX / ISO9001 Certified
Examples of qualifying platinum bars are:
Credit Suisse .9995 fine bars
Scotiabank .9995+ fine bars
Johnson Matthey .9995 fine bars

Palladium bars that are .9995+ fine that are accredited by COMEX/NYMEX / ISO9001 Certified
Examples of qualifying platinum bars are:
Pamp Suisse .9995+ fine bars
Credit Suisse .9995+ fine bars
Baird & Co. .9995+ fine bars

In short, no.

Except in cases of rollovers or transfers, contributions to your account can only be made in cash. You can only buy metals with money from inside your IRA, for direct delivery to your custodian’s storage facility.

You cannot add metals you already own even if they otherwise meet all the requirements.

Your IRA can include Real Estate, LLC’s Private Loans, Private Equity, Mutual Funds, Stocks, Bonds and a whole lot more.

Notably for precious metals investors, collectibles are not allowed – so any metal valued for it’s age, beauty or rarity rather than the intrinsic value of the metal itself will usually be unsuitable, although as usual there are some limited exceptions.

The IRS allows an IRA, Individual 401(k), HSA or ESA to acquire some types of precious metals, but not all accounts will be managed or set up to allow this.

The best way to see if this is possible is to ask your provider. If they say no, then it should be a simple case to transfer or rollover your existing account into a gold IRA.

Alternatively, because you can have more than one retirement account, you can set up a separate additional account to house your precious metals, leaving your current account as is.

You can take a distribution from your IRA, however this will be taxable and may carry additional fees and penalties.

In recent years IRA companies have started promoting “Home Storage”, “Check Book” IRAs or “LLC” IRAs as a loophole to this rule, where the IRA holder forms a Limited Liability Company. This LLC then buys gold coins (not bars, and so far only American Eagle coins are used in the scheme), which can be stored at the company HQ, which in most cases is the IRA holder’s home.

However IRS Publication 590 specifies that for all IRAs, “The trustee or custodian must be a bank, a federally insured credit union, a savings and loan association, or an entity approved by the IRS to act as trustee or custodian.”

Storing Gold IRA products in the IRA owner’s home or in a safe deposit box to which the IRA owner maintains a right of access is not within the letter or spirit of the Internal Revenue Code – that is, the tax-advantaged IRA assets should be held outside the possession and personal control of the IRA owner until retirement or early distribution.

Some Home Storage IRA companies mention the Swanson v. Commissioner case in 1996, adding that the IRS and the Department of Labor have, through field service advisory letters, and DOL advisory opinion letters, consistently acknowledged the existence of the CheckBook IRA – however the Self-Storage IRA arrangement has not been approved or recognized by the Internal Revenue Service – formally or in a no-action letter issued by the IRS, Employee Plans Division.

Because many providers set minimum purchase limits, you could find yourself unable to add to a particular asset class in a particular account if you were spread too “thin” over multiple accounts, plus an added disadvantage of having too many accounts would be paying multiple maintenance fees.

All the gold IRA providers listed on this site can provide transfer and gold rollover services.

These facilities use state of the art security and are insured to protect your investment.

Several of the larger gold IRA specialists will fully cover set-up and storage fees on volume purchases, with one Augusta Precious Metals as an example, covering up to 10 years fees and storage costs.

Contrary to popular feeling, the margins in precious metals are tiny in relation to their price and turnover, with dealer profits being as low as 0.5% on some products.

Yes. Maximum contributions are set by the IRS.

For 2022, your total contributions to all of your traditional and Roth IRAs cannot be more than $6,000 ($7,000 if you’re age 50 or older and making a $1000 Roth IRA catch-up contribution), or your taxable compensation for the year, if your compensation was less than this dollar limit.

Note that the IRA contribution limit does not apply to rollover contributions or qualified reservist repayments.

It is always advised to discuss your individual circumstances with a tax advisor.

A qualified plan will need to have been established by the last day of your fiscal year if you are to make any contributions for that year.

It is important you seek advice from your tax advisor as circumstances may vary.

It is important however that you seek guidance from a tax advisor as you may wish to keep deductible and non-deductible contributions in their own separate accounts.

Precious metals dealers can and do go out of business, usually owing millions to their clients. Other dealers can be involved in fraud and other immoral sales practices – none of which ends well for customers putting their hard earned dollar into their pockets.

It is therefore essential to research your chosen gold dealer carefully, looking at their BBB rating, time in business, complaint history and even where possible looking at their accounts if published, to check current liabilities.

Dealers tend to show warning signs prior to suddenly declaring bankruptcy, and these can be anything from sudden shipping delays and unhappy customer ratings to active court cases and federal investigations.

Thankfully the internet (and our directory) is at your disposal and you can find out a lot about any given company very quickly.

Unless you are specifically looking for the concentrated value offered by premium-grade coins, try and buy investment metals at their lowest possible premium over the spot price.

This tends to be easier with larger purchases, either through a volume discount of small bars and coins, or because larger bars naturally have lower premiums.

But even looking at similar bars or coins, there can be huge variety in markup from dealer to dealer. If you pay less at the start, you need a smaller increase in market prices to be in profit, or can bear a bigger drop in price without loss.

Popular coins and bars are typically easier to sell. No matter what the market conditions for example you can always sell well known and instantly recognizable coins such as a Canadian Maples or US Eagles at a fair market price.

In an ideal world the early 1980’s!

But without the benefit of a time machine the lower you can buy gold at the better, typically after a major drop, or early on in a buoyant rising market.

Do you buy now, or wait for the next inevitable price correction?

Truth is most investors in physical gold buy to hold for the long term, not trade on dips and troughs, so therefore precise timing isn’t essential. For this reason despite media hype or hatred of gold, any time is a good time.

Basically over time gold tends to hold and gain in value against weaker paper currencies and volatile paper assets.

As an example $33,000 put into a gold IRA in 2002 was worth $243,519 just 20 years later in 2022.

$33,000 invested in the Dow Jones at the same time would be worth $147,496 - some $96,000 less than gold.

During this time period, yes absolutely the gold price rose and fell, but it’s overall trend is typically upwards – and this is why gold bought at any price or time tends to be a great investment over the longer term.