Where to buy/store gold?

Money & Investing: Gold & Silver

David Hewitt June 24, 2015 at 8:59 am

Hi there!

Can anyone give me some initial advice on where and how to purchase and store physical gold? I’ve never done this before and I figure this is probably the most trustworthy forum for such advice.

A bit about my situation. I’m from the UK (Northern Ireland) and have bought gold coins in the past but these were always delivered to me and are in my own possession. I want to buy and store a much larger amount as safely as possible because holding this gold myself is not really an option. My reasoning is that I am considering selling my house and travelling around the world on a motorbike.

Ultimately I would like to buy a rental property somewhere that would provide me with some passive income while I travel but would probably rule out the UK. This means I need to put the value somewhere in the mean time and it certainly is not going to be put in a bank!

Thanks

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Helmuth Hubener June 24, 2015 at 12:20 pm

You could look up “Safe Deposit Boxes” in your city, or whatever city you may choose. Large cities will usually have safe deposit box providers (private vaults) that are not banks. These would remain accessible should the country declare “bank holidays” and so are the superior choice. Plus, this goes along with your wish to not keep your wealth in a bank.

Austria and Switzerland especially have extensive high-quality offerings. Since it sounds as if you plan to have no particular ties to any one place in the world in the future, but likely would continue to come to Europe frequently, those countries may be well worth looking into as storage locales. E.g.: http://www.dassafe.com/e_index.html

Happy riding!

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  Anonymous June 24, 2015 at 1:37 pm
  
  Hi David, accounts with the Perth Mint or the Canadian mint may be options for you to explore.
  
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    David Hewitt June 24, 2015 at 5:40 pm
    
    Yes Tom I actually forgot about the Perth Mint. This could be a great option because my brother lives in Perth and is an Australian citizen.
    
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  David Hewitt June 24, 2015 at 5:36 pm
  
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  David Hewitt June 24, 2015 at 5:41 pm
  
  Thanks Helmuth, I’ll most likely be coming back to this thread after a ton of research. Any links to sound advice on how and where to purchase would also be much appreciated if you know of any.
  
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    Frank Maruschak June 24, 2015 at 5:55 pm
    
    You might also want to think about some silver coins, or even diamonds. One of the advantages of any of these is a lot of value in a small space. In The United States gold bars are considered a commodity and can be confiscated in what the Government considers an “emergency”. I don’t know what the circumstances are in other countries. I think generally coins are a safer bet. I would suggest that contacting or at least researching money changers. Find out which medium is the easiest to exchange. The “dollar” used to be good around the world, but not so much any more. Since in reality the world works on the credit and debt system maybe a good piece of plastic would be the best thing to carry.
    
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    - David Hewitt June 24, 2015 at 6:07 pm
      
      Frank, I didnt mention it in my OP but I would be most likely buying and storing gold (90%) and silver (10%).
      
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  Thehumanfaucet July 27, 2015 at 10:23 pm
  
  Bank Holidays also extend to private vaults . Buy gold and bury it if your paranoid or holding for long time.Like crypto its useless if you have to ask someone else for your assets
  
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Helmuth Hubener June 25, 2015 at 11:37 am

You’re very welcome, Mr. Hewitt. It is hard to give you purchasing advice, because you live in a different country than me. If you were in the US, I could tell you exactly how to buy and give you a list of several good gold vendors. But I know nothing of the vendors in the UK.

Then again, gold is light, and so you could just buy from the US and the shipping probably wouldn’t add that much. So here’s my US advice:

Colorado Gold
GoldMart
Gainesville Coins
APJM

If you stick with one of those, you should be happy.

To get the best price, it can be helpful to check here:
https://comparegoldprices.com

To have a good overall experience, you may wish to check out the reviews here:
http://golddealerreviews.com

Personally, I have had good experience with these fellows, and plus they do specialize in large/wholesale orders like yours would be (a house-worth of coins is quite a bit):
http://aeiccc.com

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Helmuth Hubener June 25, 2015 at 11:57 am

Frank, here’s the thing: nobody knows what’s in your safe deposit box. The government sure doesn’t know. A safe deposit could have anything in it, and nine times out of ten it won’t be a bunch of gold. So are they going to confiscate everyone’s safe deposit boxes on the off chance that there’s enough valuables in there to make it worth the expense in manpower and political capital? The US government did not do that when they confiscated gold back in the 1930s. I don’t know of any government that has, though there doubtless are some. Maybe the Soviet Union. So you never know, but it seems unlikely to me, particularly in Switzerland. Doing that would destroy a banking reputation they’ve built up carefully for hundreds of years.

That would be one advantage a generic safe deposit box has over storage at Perth Mint or another gold repository. It’s very unlikely that any gold repository is going to be confiscated in any stable Western country, but if a government did go crazy and decide it wanted to confiscate a bunch of gold for reasons that I guarantee would make absolutely no sense (there’s an unlimited array of much, much easier ways for them to raise funds, and much more funds — the amount of gold stored is peanuts compared to the amount available by raising the VAT 0.1%) it is going to go after easy targets with a lot of gold first, right? Big vaults known to be full of gold. Go after safe deposit boxes and you’re going to get a whole lot of family photos, house deeds, wills, trinkets, and legal documents. Big waste of time.

Also, yes, of course go with one ounce coins, not bars, that goes without saying. Bars would only make sense once you’re talking millions of pounds/dollars, not hundreds of thousands. A single 400-ounce bar (the standard size) is over $400,000. That’s a lot, and not very liquid. The coin premium is not that much, especially on Krugerrands, and you should get it back anyway when you sell. So bars are just not worth it, in my opinion. Once you’re storing millions worth of gold, then yes.

I personally would not get a significant amount of silver, just a few hundred dollars worth for an emergency situation. But that’s just me. Obviously with silver shipping costs are much, much more and you absolutely need to find a local source.

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  Toni Sopocko June 25, 2015 at 4:28 pm
  
  The thing with safe deposit boxes, at least in the US, is if you die, and they find out, it’s shut down till the legal eagles can do their thing. So if you seriously want someone else to have what you’ve got left in there, make sure their name is on the box, they have a key, and that they know they MUST, on your death, go straight to that box and clean it out before sitting down to mourn. Immediately.
  
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    Helmuth Hubener June 29, 2015 at 3:53 pm
    
    Yes, I second this. Avoiding probate is always desirable.
    
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  Thehumanfaucet July 27, 2015 at 11:13 pm
  
  Cyprus has , Greece boxes, are all frozen and untouchable. UK passed same law in 2014 USA came into effect in 2015 google facts .
  
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Alan Lynch June 29, 2015 at 9:16 am

Hi David,

I’m from the UK (Birmingham) and I would recommend Gold Money, Bullion Vault and Bitgold as very good providers for storing some gold, silver and other metals in lots of different locations in the world.

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  Nate Hawk July 11, 2015 at 10:51 pm
  
  This is a tough question to answer. I think everybody’s threshold for allowing fiduciary control over their own investments will vary. Whatever you decide to do with your hard earned wealth, I’d encourage you to do so without a fiduciary. I’d rather have it sitting in the ground or an old, junky, worthless (locked) Coke machine pushed in the corner of a buddy’s garage and buried under newspapers,etc. Having it somewhere that I may not be able to get to it later would be one of the most worrisome options for me.
  -Nate Hawk
  
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Blue Square July 13, 2015 at 10:49 am

Vincent Malherbe of GPM wrote a guide for us on some of these questions: https://liberty.me/guides/how-to-buy-sell-and-store-precious-metals/

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Josh Wells July 27, 2015 at 8:02 pm

What is the intended purpose of purchasing gold?

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  Roger Browne July 28, 2015 at 7:18 am
  
  Gold is a hedge against a catastrophic collapse of fiat currency.
  
  I don’t see much other purpose. In the long run, the value of gold is inflation-proof, but it’s not a productive investment. I’d rather be playing the stock market for a long-term average return of inflation plus 4%, compounded.
  
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    Josh Wells July 28, 2015 at 9:48 pm
    
    That is what I was thinking Roger. It must be a nice problem to have to be looking to purchase more gold than is practical to take possession of. I don’t have that problem! 🙂 I prefer to buy and take possession of my precious metals. I would rather trust myself to not lose it than trust someone else, especially in the face of some unforeseen circumstances where I would really need possession of it. Short of that I would probably look at something like the Sprott physical gold trust. There are tax advantages over some of the other options out there and it is backed by and redeemable for the physical metal. But again you are trusting a third party and if I’m buying and selling physical gold in person with no paper trail then I’ll take my chances with the tax man. The all seeing eye doesn’t see that well.
    
    Also if buying it as a hedge against inflation I think people should be careful about that. Over the long term it holds up well but in the short term to medium term it can be very volatile and fail to keep up with inflation. Just look at the spot price for the 80’s and 90’s to see what I mean.
    
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Helmuth Hubener July 28, 2015 at 10:50 am

“Cyprus has , Greece boxes, are all frozen and untouchable. UK passed same law in 2014 USA came into effect in 2015. Google facts .”

Presumably this is an answer in reply to my question:

So are they going to confiscate everyone’s safe deposit boxes on the off chance that there’s enough valuables in there to make it worth the expense in manpower and political capital? The US government did not do that when they confiscated gold back in the 1930s. I don’t know of any government that has, though there doubtless are some.

So… is your answer right? Well, yes and no. I agree with the meta-point you are making, which is: “Be careful, be skeptical, do not trust all your savings to any one else’s single basket!”

But factually: The contents of safe deposit boxes in Cyprus were never seized — neither boxes in banks, nor in private vault facilities. Not that it couldn’t have happened — that’s all too conceivable. But it didn’t. Bank deposit accounts were what were given a “haircut” in Cyprus. Safe deposit boxes both inside and outside banks were unaffected, and are still running fine and doing business, for example see: http://www.sgcyprus.com/sgbcy/Safe-deposit-boxes

Did Greece seize all the contents of safe deposit boxes? Again, the answer is no. Olga-Nadia Valavani, the Alternate Minister of Finance, at one point announced that the safe deposit boxes in banks were to be unavailable for withdrawals. This announcement was apparently not universally complied with by the banks. The banks who did stop allowing withdrawals from safe deposit boxes soon allowed them again, and as of now safe deposit boxes, even within banks, are all unrestricted and open. No seizure took place. All contents remained untouched. See: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=el&u=http://www.thetoc.gr/oikonomia/article/guardian-i-efodos-stis-thurides-pou-den-egine&prev=search

Furthermore, private vault services were unaffected. Unaffected other than, according to reporter on-the-ground Nigel Fagge, doing a brisk business and having an increase of customers. All this excitement was good for their business (of course).

In short, I still stand by my advice as relatively sound. My advice was to store gold in a private vault (not in a bank), in a top jurisdiction, and with a long-standing company with a good reputation. This gives multiple layers of protection. The Greek crisis demonstrates that. Even if you broke two of the three rules and stored your gold in a bank box (not ideal), and stored it in Greece (certainly not a good jurisdictional choice), you still would have come through this latest crisis unscathed.

Storing yourself at home is fine, but that is not an option for Mr. Hewitt, the opening poster. Furthermore, there are very real risks involved in storing gold at home. People seem to sometimes forget that, or never consider it. The chances of a roommate, or a family member, or a guest, stealing your gold from your home are statistically much greater than the chances of your gold being confiscated or otherwise stolen from an armored, guarded vault deep in the mountains of Switzerland. And even if it was, the vault’s insured. So now your scenario is that something extremely unlikely happens that compromises your gold in Switzerland (or Austria) and, also, that Lloyd’s of London (or whoever the insurer is) simultaneously goes bankrupt. What’s more, you can also get your own insurance policy on the gold, independent of and in addition to the insurance the private vault has. And so now that insurance company would need to fail, too.

Scenario for home storage: your ex-wife or your teenage son gets mad at you and takes your stash.

Tell me which one is more likely? Tell me which one happens, in fact, all the time?

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Wa— September 18, 2015 at 6:09 pm

Hi David, here is a list of non-bank deposit boxes http://www.offshoreprivatevaults.com/list-of-offshore-private-vaults.html . I have no experience with any of them but the ones in Dublin and Vienna seem interesting. With the same proviso, here are three metals dealers that offer non-bank storage; the first two of them accept bitcoin, which would simplify things for you while traveling:

https://suissegold.com/home.php

https://www.bullionstar.com/

https://www.globalgold.ch/en/home/

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David Warren August 18, 2017 at 6:04 pm

If you are new investing it can be so confusing where to even begin if you want to start buying gold and silver.

I have started a new site at http://www.hardstacks.com that is going to break down all the different ways you can invest and which method is right for you.

As far as choosing the right dealer, check out my reviews of my favorite places to buy bullion.

You can see the different factors to look for when choosing a metals dealer.

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