IRA

As the nation considers the results the last decade of federal spending and the historic quantitative easing introduced by the Federal Reserve, more and more investors are looking for safe-havens for their long term savings and retirement money. Many investors are concerned about what will happen to the future of their 401K, IRA, or other tax-sheltered account. Fortunately for gold/silver buyers, there’s good news. Current rules allow investors to put almost any kind of tax-deferred money into physical gold and silver. Not just a gold ETF or fancy trading account that represents “virtual” gold or silver, but you can actually own physical gold/silver coins (or bars) in your retirement accounts.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say you have an IRA with $50,000 in it, and you don’t like the risk of the stock market or the pathetic returns offered by savings and money market accounts. You can transfer that IRA money into a special Precious Metals IRA Account and use the $50,000 to buy physical gold or silver bullion. The funds are spent by your IRA custodian to purchase the bullion on your behalf, and then the bullion is stored in a secure vault in a US-based depository in your name. Those coins will sit there on the shelf in that vault with your name on them until you choose to take a disbursement from your IRA. That disbursement will be governed by all the normal rules on eligibility (including age, qualified expenses, etc.).

The good news is that if things ever get really bad and you’d like to take physical possession of your gold/silver yourself, you can tell the depository to ship you your coins/bars (subject to any appropriate penalties and take an early distributions). It’s just like taking a cash distribution from your IRA, except instead of getting a check in the mail, the coins are shipped directly from the depository straight to your door within a couple days of your request. Pretty simple!