The global economy seems to be in an uncertain phase, there is a growing danger of another armed conflict in the middle east that may push up oil and gold prices and induce a financial meltdown, even if there is no financial meltdown and let`s keep our fingers crossed that there is no melt down, even then the financial uncertainty is too great and one must take some sort of protective measure to secure the savings and investment. Investing in gold and silver is seen as a way to stabilize the savings. Gold is a precious metal and a commodity and it has intrinsic value, this means that even in the worst case scenario gold will not drop down to zero like other investment options. A popular option in the United States is to rollover an existing 401k into a gold backed IRA for retirement. There are many options to choose from when deciding on a dependable gold IRA. It is interesting to note that in the last 2 decades the price of gold has risen from $400 per ounce to over $1500 per ounce. Yes the price of gold fluctuates but the general trend has been upwards.
So, let us look at some of the ways to invest into gold and silver. Gold is currently trading at over $1500 per ounce but it still may not be too late to invest in it.
Bullion
Bullion coins are probably the quickest, fastest and the best way for a new investor to start buying physical gold and silver. They’re easy to store, easy to get your hands on, easy to carry around and easy to sell. Some of the coins in the market are actually not pure gold, meaning they don’t contain 99.99% gold content and in fact these include some of the more popular ones like the American Gold Eagle and the Gold Krugerrand, just something to keep in mind. These are still very good investments and they will sell very well but one should prefer to buy something like the American Gold Buffalo which is fine gold, 99.9% pure and typically a little bit cheaper than some of the other options.
Most of the silver, are fine silver 99.9% and these are some of the most popular ones here and the ones that are recommended are the American Silver Eagle it’s highly recognizable and is traded all the time and you may get a small little premium when you sell it back.
Bars And Ingots
This is the most concentrated form of investing in physical gold or silver and so when you’re ready to switch from coins and you want to get a little bit more bang for your buck, you’re going to want to buy gold and silver bars and ingots. Gold bars and ingots come in various sizes, from one ounce up to ten ounces up to one kilo, which for the average investor is probably pretty expensive.
Silver is a little bit more attainable for the average investor and the 100 ounce Johnson Matthey bar is a very popular silver bar to buy and something that a lot of different investors use.
Junk Silver
The term junk is a little bit misleading because old coins issued before 1964 or earlier are actually quite valuable. In 1964, US coins actually contained 90% silver which is pretty interesting as compared to what they’re made out of now where it costs more money to mint them and are not near as valuable as they once were, so it’d be nice if we could go back to a day where coins were actually made out of the metal that they started out with. There are different sizes you can buy, there’s $100 face value and there’s a $500 face value coin and you can purchase up to $1000 face value coins. Keep in mind that the $1000 face value coin must be reported the IRS at the time of sale, the other two do not have to be reported.
Gold Jewelry
Here is an interesting way of buying physical gold and silver and it’s something that a lot of Western investors don`t embrace that well but in countries in South Asia, they’ve been practicing this form of saving for centuries and it’s quite common to see a lot of people there with a lot of gold jewelry. Gold is gifted in weddings to the bride and for anniversaries and other events and that’s why India is actually the biggest consumer in the world of gold today, Western investors should really take a look at this because buying gold jewelry actually has some nice benefits, it’s exempt from IRS, another one is that it’s a discreet means of transporting wealth meaning you could fly out of the country draped in a hundred thousand dollars worth of gold jewelry and you don’t have to declare it and it won’t be confiscated.
When buying gold jewelry as an investment be sure to buy investment grade and that’s 22 carat you don’t want to buy some of the regular jewelry out there that you see in regular jewelry stores a lot of the that jewelry has much less gold like 14 carat and maybe a little bit more and when reselling those that’s considered scrap gold and it’s much harder to get the full value back of the metal content and you’ll be lucky to get 72 or 80% of what it’s actually worth
Numismatic Coins
There are a few coins out there that do that are collected and do carry a good value and actually have a good amount of metal of gold or silver content in them and are easily tradable and you may even make a little bit of money but there are a lot of shady companies out there where they try to get new investors to pay a huge amount for so-called rare numismatic coins that are not nearly worth as much as they paid for and you can’t sell them they don’t sell very easily and you certainly can’t get the money that you paid for them so just buyer beware .
I would personally not recommend these coins because while they are a collectors item and carry high value but they are illiquid. If you need some quick case and want to sell these coins, you may have to wait a while before you can find a collector who will be willing to buy the coin(s).
Exchange Traded Funds
ETFs are for those investors who are less interested in the physical possession of gold and more interested in the performance of gold derivatives. ETFs have the full functionality of shares and trade on stock exchanges and can be bought and sold like normal shares, in addition to this they contain the periodic returns, which makes them more desirable for investors looking to make a profit by investing in gold. At no point though, will you be in possession of gold. Your investment will be in the gold ETF that will be tracking an underlying index.
