What's the best way to buy gold and keep it

[upi402]

I'm looking for the best way to buy gold and keep it safe. I don't mean I'm buying a brick, small weights are best.
Not looking for an artsy coin, I just want the weight at the lowest cost.
How do I ensure purity from a seller?
Who is a reputable seller?

Thanks!

[poverlay]

1. I'd like to know too. n/t

[wuushew]

2. Gold should be used for the benefit of technology and electronics

not melted down into useless coinage and bobbles.

[upi402]

4. economic survival in a capitalist world

i like living indoors and eating food.

[mitchtv]

21. Its good for crossing borders, too

It is a lovely element with a culture and history of great artistic merit.

[A HERETIC I AM]

3. Credit Suisse

The link below has a pic of a 1 gram gold ingot by Credit Suisse. 99.9% pure. Store them in a safe deposit box. Most commodities or securities brokers will be able to help you acquire them.

http://lynncoins.com/Gold_BARS.htm

on edit to add that ingots, plain ones are simple, gold bars that can weigh up to and over an ounce but from a gram to an ounce are the most common if i am not mistaken.

www.creditsuisse.com i looked but couldnt find a spot on their site that mentioned gold ingots specifically but if you live in or near a large city, they are sure to have a branch there.

[upi402]

5. Thank you, I'm hoping for 'no commission fee' -is it possible?

thanks for the reply!

[A HERETIC I AM]

6. Well, probably not! After all, you are BUYING something and the seller

is going to want to make something. Look in the financial section of your local paper for the spot price of gold. It is posted per ounce. You could easily find it online, for that matter at most brokerage websites as well as dow jones.com If you buy coins you are going to pay for collectible value. Gold ingots that aren't decorated with the statue of liberty like on the link i gave above will keep a value closer to market. To expect more is to assume there will be someone that is willing to pay more.

If you have a large amount of money to invest, any decent, reputable securities adviser would recommend putting a certain amount of money in precious metals. But be careful. Commodities brokers are out there to make money just like anyone else and gold is a commodity, just like coal, oil, pork bellies and frozen concentrated orange juice. Avoid being talked into "Futures" unless you are willing to throw away any money you are willing to risk.

Find yourself a financial adviser you can trust. They aren't like lawyers that charge you by the minute to talk to them. Asking financial questions that involve risk on a message board is ill advised.

On edit to clarify...a good stock or securities broker is NOT necessarily a commodities broker. They are licensed differently. Securities are stocks, bonds and mutual funds. Commodities are just that - tangible things like tons of coal or ounces of gold. Be careful.

[PinkTiger]

7. Some cautious advice

Gold and other precious metals may look like prudent investments, but unless you are in it for the long haul, steer clear. If you are worried about economic collapse, gold should be the least of your investments. Instead, invest in survivalist gear and plan for the worst by stockpiling ways to make fire, purify water, and grow your own food.

Gold should be looked at as a fun investment, similar to stamps and Hallmark ornament collections. Only, with gold, you will be damn lucky to get what you paid for it when you sell; it is a volatile commodity with historical highs and lows and bipolar swings in value. However, if you plan to keep it for 40 years or so, it will be a good solid investment that may grow with inflation.

Truthfully, the best investment for long term is a diversified portfolio. And the way things are looking in Washington, the survivalist gear is looking better and better. LOL

[Art_from_Ark]

12. Speaking as someone who bought his first gold coin at age 9,

and who has studied the history of fiat currencies (with quite a collection of old but worthless Brazilian reales, cruzeiros, and cruzados; Serbian dinars; German notgeld; Peruvian soles; Mexican pesos; Indonesian rupiah; and who knows what other demonetized paper) I feel I have something to contribute here.

First of all, gold has been valued as money for thousands of years, far longer than any other medium. In recent times, it has helped the French, Germans, Hungarians, Japanese, Mexicans, Brazilians, Argentinians, Peruvians, Serbians, and a host of other nationalities survive when their own fiat currencies became so much worthless paper.

Gold is in limited, but not too limited supply. It can not be whipped up out of nowhere by governments, like paper money. It does not tarnish or burn, and its melting point is over 1850 degrees Fahrenheit. It takes up just a small space but is quite valuable.

Thus, gold can be attractive, but you have to do your homework if you are thinking of investing. The first thing to do is pick up some recent copies of industry/collector weeklies like Numismatic News and Coin World. The advertisers in these publications are held to a high standard, so if you order from them you shouldn't have to worry about counterfeits (plus, the post office comes down hard on mail fraud).

The most popular gold investments for the small investor in the US are the Gold Eagle bullion coins put out by the US Mint. They come in 4 sizes (1/10 oz, 1/4 oz, 1/2 oz., and 1 oz) and are handled by all large and reputable coin dealers. The price differential between dealer buy and sell prices is usually about 15-20 dollars for the 1 ounce coin.

I will write more later.

[PinkTiger]

18. Art! Good to "hear" from you.

I agree with what you said. Although I don't know much about gold bullion, I do know that it is a collector's thing, and not something to buy just to resell in a few months for a profit. In the long term, Gold is a wonderful, stable investment.

[Art_from_Ark]

19. True, you definitely have to have a long-term outlook

Gold certainly isn't a jump-in, jump-out sort of thing. Most of the gold I have now, for example, I have held for at least 3 years. I view it more as an insurance policy, and so won't bet the farm on it, for sure.

I am intrigued by the histories of the countries I mentioned. Most of them had issued gold coins at one time or another, but through war, poor leadership, or whatever other extraneous circumstances may have been working against them, they were forced to abandon gold and start issuing paper money that was backed by... faith in the issuing authority (talk about a faith-based system!). When faith in the authority (often, from outside the country) failed, the currency went belly-up. I've got a few 500,000,000,000 (five-hundred billion!) dinar notes from Serbia, for example, that were issued a mere 12 years ago. Their value today? They have a little value as collector oddities, but little else, since they were eventually demonetized. Serbians who were stuck with this paper were really hit hard. Serbians who had some gold did much better.

The United States is the only country that I can think of where all of the money for domestic (stateside) use it has issued since its Mint began operations is still considered legal tender. However, it can print as much paper as it wants. I often ask myself, will there eventually be consequences to this? As long as the world respects American paper, dollars will be relatively OK. But if the dollar's influence fades too much, what will happen then? Things are happening now that I couldn't conceive of happening just a few years ago. So, from my own viewpoint, a little insurance policy would seem to be in order.

[PinkTiger]

28. While we are talking about gold: what happened to the gold bars at 911?

I'm talking about the bars that were reported to be in the basement of the World Trade Center (not sure which tower) when it collapsed. In vaults. I remember hearing about the gold bars and about the art work stored there, including some really valuable Kennedy pictures and negatives.

Anyone know???

[Art_from_Ark]

31. Interesting question

I did some searching of both the general media and coin-related publications, but the only reference in this sense to "gold" that I found was concerning a confiscated gold coin that had been stored at Building #7 for a short time a few months before the attacks.

[PinkTiger]

33. Here's an interesting article on it

http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/gold.html

Missing Gold

A King's Ransom in Precious Metals Seems to have Disappeared


This image is found on the PBS.org website companion for the television documentary America Rebuilds under the section Uncovering Property. The page, entitled A Treasure in Silver and Gold, describes the vault as two levels of 3,000 square feet each. See the source for the full-sized image. The page credits images to Leslie E. Robertson and Associates.
There are rumors that $160 billion in gold bullion was stored under the World Trade Center. Yet the only published articles about recovered gold mention only around $200 million worth of gold. All of the reports of recovered precious metals appear to refer to a removal operation conducted in late October of 2001. On Nov. 1, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani announced that "more than $230 million" worth of gold and silver bars that had been stored in a bomb-proof vault had been recovered. A New York Times article contained: 1

Two Brinks trucks were at ground zero on Wednesday to start hauling away the $200 million in gold and silver that the Bank of Nova Scotia had stored in a vault under the trade center ... A team of 30 firefighters and police officers are helping to move the metals, a task that can be measured practically down to the flake but that has been rounded off at 379,036 ounces of gold and 29,942,619 ounces of silver ..
Another article gave a figure of $650 million to the value of gold in the 4 WTC vault.

Unknown to most people at the time, $650 million in gold and silver was being kept in a special vault four floors beneath Four World Trade Center. The gold and silver were recently recovered.
An article in the TimesOnline gives the following rundown of precious metals that were being stored in WTC vaults belonging to Comex. 2

Comex metals trading - 3,800 gold bars weighing 12 tonnes and worth more than $100 million
Comex clients - 800,000 ounces of gold with a value of about $220 million
Comex clients - 102 million ounces of silver, worth $430 million
Bank of Nova Scotia - $200 million of gold
That totals $950 million.
There appear to be no reports of precious metals discovered between November of 2001 and the completion of excavation several months later. It would seem that at least the better part of a billion dollars worth of precious metals went missing. It is not plausible that whatever destroyed the towers vaporized gold and silver, which are dense, inert metals that are extremely unlikely to participate in chemical reactions with other materials.

The circumstances surrounding part of the gold that was recovered offer clues to what may have happened to the unrecovered gold. According to reports, two truckloads of gold were found in a delivery tunnel under 5 World Trade Center in a 10-wheel lorry which had been crushed by falling steel. The vault was under 4 World Trade Center, which was closer to the South Tower, and more heavily damaged. There were no bodies discovered with the lorry, suggesting that whoever was removing the gold was warned of the imminent collapse of the South Tower. 3

[Cleita]

8. Well, I like my gold baubles.

The higher the carat the purer the gold content. I don't think gold is really a hedge against loss of fortune anymore, so enjoy your baubles and maybe the gold content might be worth something if you find yourself in in bind.

[mmonk]

9. Try

http://www.GoldMoney.com .

Digital gold.

[upi402]

10. Great! Gold skyrocketed in the late 70's and I thought

that it would be a good addition to the dollar cost averaging that I do now through a fund manager.
The debt which is owned by the communist Chinese combined with the aging population will change our economy very significantly for the rest of my years. I don't see how it couldn't.

-Good advice, thanks

[sam sarrha]

11. i am a jeweler..wire and sheet that can be turned into something sellable?

but you would need to know what that would be

[mojavekid]

13. Here are a couple places to start,

Here are a couple links that might help. Study up and you will be fine.

http://www.cmi-gold-silver.com/index.html

I have dealt with these folks for a long time,

http://www.golddealer.com/

[Mojorabbit]

14. Don't laugh

But I buy mine on ebay and only from sellers with a very high pos feedback.

[librechik]

23. I live in Denver, Colorado

I grew up going to the mint every year. Denver's kind of the American Home of Gold, although I'm sure there's lots of other places which would argue over that. They should show me their mint. Ok, San Fransisco.

I go down the street to Rocky Mountain Coin http://www.rmcoin.com/index.html






and buy American Eagles. You can actually buy all kinds of coins, but we've found the eagles to be the best, and resell at daily value, no problem. Ten minutes after you're in the store, you have your money or your gold, whichever. Liquid is a natural state for gold.

They also sell on line and by mail. Always a good price, but yes there's always a commission.Twenty thousand dollars fits in a small shoebox.

We thought and thought about how to store it, and have gone back and forth over whether to keep it close where you can grab it in an emergency, or in a box at the bank. We don't own any nowadays,(traded it for real estate)so that worry is over. Where you keep your gold is a personal decision you're going to have to make yourself.

Before you store it at home, may I suggest you watch "Rolling Thunder," a cool movie about a returning hero Nam Vet who is given a belt made of gold coins by his grateful little town, only to have scummy thieves break into his house, kill his family, and force him to say where the belt is by putting his hand in the garbage disposer. Not that putting the gold in a box at the bank would have stopped those guys--I'm just sayin.

Think about it. Gold is heavy, in more ways than one.

[MadHound]

15. Well, first off, why are you buying gold?

Are you buying it as an investment, or as the "oh shit" fund when the country goes belly up and the dollar is just a piece of paper?

If you're buying it for investment purposes, don't. Right now is not the time, for gold has probably reached the apex of its current price flight. It might go up a little more in value, but it could just as easily start a gradual decline. Rather, if you're thinking of a gold investment, there are mutual funds out there that are composed solely of investments in gold trading companies. You will continue to make money as the price slides back down.

If you want gold for the "oh shit" fund, then now may not be the best time to buy, due to the price being inflated. You could wait awhile and see if the price goes down, and purchase then. I would recommend buying coins, the US Gold Eagle and kugerrands are both good, pure coins to have, and it won't cost you the fees that bullion bricks do.

[Art_from_Ark]

16. You make a lot of good comments

You are probably right about taking a wait-and-see attitude toward buying physical gold as an investment. Its rally seems to have stalled, at least for the moment. Maybe it has peaked, maybe it is "catching its breath". Who knows? It's interesting to note that there are some factors involved here that weren't here before, though-- such as nouveau riche in India and China buying up gold in historic quantities. At the same time, there doesn't seem to be the threat of European central banks dumping gold, which has helped to stall previous gold rallies. The year 2001 was really bad for gold, in that there was a double whammy-- people had been dumping their gold after they found out that Y2K was overblown, and European central banks were dumping in preparation for the Euro. So perhaps now gold has found some support for a bottom price.

You are also right about the Gold Eagle coins-- but there is still a stigma attached to the Krugerrands. Some dealers won't touch them even today, because of problems they had, perceived and actual, during the apartheid sanctions. A lot of investors, and even customs agents, thought that all K-Rands were illegal to hold back in the late '80s, and they were shunned like the plague. On the other hand, since the Uncle Sam is plugging his own Gold Eagles through the US Mint, they should be safe for a long time to come.

[Chemical Bill]

17. maybe...

"Maybe it has peaked, maybe it is "catching its breath". Who knows?"

Maybe the US government dumps gold on the market to keep prices down. Maybe the US government is going to confiscate privately held gold, like they did in the past. Just a couple of thoughts.

Bill

[Art_from_Ark]

20. Gold confiscation, etc.

During the gold recall of the 1930s, it was actually not illegal to hold gold coins. Treasury Secretary Morganthau added a little provision to the recall order that allowed for people to hold on to an indefinite amount of gold coins, as long as the limits on dates were not exceeded. This provision was not made widely known, however, and most folks thought they had to turn in all their gold coins. This is what my grandfather believed, for example, and for a long time he thought he had done something "illegal" by putting away a couple of gold coins "for posterity". I think it would be difficult for Uncle Sam to recall gold coins now-- at least, American gold coins-- because he has been pushing sales of his Gold Eagle bullion coins. I don't think that even the wackiest right-wing judge could support the government's position in such a case, since all the plaintiffs would have to do, I think, is submit the Mint's own advertising as Exhibit A.

As for US dumping to keep the price of gold down, that's anyone's guess. Certainly, European and other central banks have been notorious for dumping gold, then buying back at lower rates. As one coin writer I know of likes to say, "Central banks are net sellers of gold".

[oregonindy]

27. can you tell me where you get your information about gold going down?

Everything I follow says our economy is nosediving, our currency is crap and deficits to infinity.

[silverlib]

22. www.tulving.com

I wish I could remember the name of the DUer that recommended this guy. At the time, I bought silver and his markup was less than anyone else I could find and he does stand by his product. The box split in mailing and coins were missing. He replaced them within a week.

The minimum has gone up since I purchased and it seems like his markup may have gone up some as well. But compare. I haven't checked prices of other dealers lately, but I can and will stand by Mr. Tulving as an honest businessman.

[bbgrunt]

24. If you want to buy gold, and have decided on buying bullion,

you can go to http://www.kitco.com/ to get a lot of good info.

You also have to decide if you want to buy actual gold or gold stocks and what level of risk you want to take with those gold stocks.

If you buy actual gold, it is probably best to buy coins such as amerikan eagles, canadian maples, austrian philharmonics etc. Several of these can be bought in different denominations. The full one oz. coins being the most popular. Unless you do your own assaying, you pretty well have to rely on a coin dealer or some other 3rd party to guarantee your purchase. But generally, the coins are more reliable than bars.

While keeping coins in a safe deposit box seems rational, there is no way to insure safe deposit boxes. Secondly, if there were an order for government to confiscate, they could simply require all boxes to be opened by owners and inspected for gold bullion.....so there is still some risk.

gold jumped quite a bit in the last two days.........lots of questions about how much manipulation goes on by central banks and others. It is a very curious market--and gold won't quench your thirst or fill your belly when those things become scarce.

[oregonindy]

25. two sites that may help you

www.urbansurvival.com


www.goldismoney.info

[notadmblnd]

26. spot price for gold today is 502

it's gone up quite a bit in the last 2 years. Silver is up over 8 dollars an ounce. There are coin dealers everywhere, but you'll pay more than spot. I paid 410.00 for my American Eagles and that was when spot was a round 394.00. Ask your bank. I bought my silver when it was real cheap about 12 yrs ago through my credit union. The federal government also sells it but if you buy it from them, they can track it. I bought my gold coins at the local flea market.. cash and carry.

African kugerands I think are the purest and the American Eagles I think are next in line. You can purchase smaller denominations than 1 ounce 50 dollar gold pieces but without looking it up, I can't tell you what they are. If you don't have a lot of cash I would go with the silver.

[Art_from_Ark]

29. The US Government doesn't sell bullion coins directly to consumers

It sells to distributors. The gold coins the government sells to consumers are collector coins, which are sold at a high premium.

You'll always pay more than spot for gold-- that's always been how it works. Dealers aren't going to handle the coins (and take the associated financial risks) for free.

You're taking a big chance buying gold at flea markets. A flea market operator I knew in Arkansas got busted for selling fake gold coins. Cash and carry also means there's no way to make a claim if you do get stuck with bad coins.

Krugerrands are not the purest bullion gold-- they are 22K. They also have a stigma attached to them that remains from the apartheid days, and some dealers still won't touch them. If you want pure gold coins, Canadian Maple Leafs, Austrian Philharmonics, various Australian bullion coins, and some others are 9999/10000 pure. The US is planning on issuing a pure gold Eagle in the near future.

[upi402]

30. gold investing is a zero sum game to me

I just figure this economic house of cards will topple. If gold drops 10% and the United States of America drops 60%, then the margin is 50 points and I live indoors and eat good food. But if that even looks likely, gold should soar as a safe hedge in a higher percentage of many portfolios.

The 'oh shit' factor -but not the survivalist scenario -is where my interest lies. As in, "Oh shit, this carboard box leaks".

[Art_from_Ark]

32. Economic House Of Cards (EHOC)

I have been hearing about this since at least the early '70s, when the last vestiges of precious metals were removed from our coins and Nixon took the dollar completely off the gold standard. I had thought we had reached the Rubicon in early 1980, when gold and silver busted the charts and inflation was 15%. But things changed after that, at least on the surface.

But one thing that is obviously different now, I think, is that we are saddled with "leaders" who don't seem to have the foggiest idea of what the economic consequences of their actions may be, or even that they give a crap if they do know. They've shown time and again that they're more interested in stuffing their own pockets than they are in designing a sustainable economic system that benefits as many average citizens as possible. Like you, I don't see how there cannot be ramifications somewhere down the road.