How to Buy Physical Gold [Step-by-Step]

Posted on April 1, 2020 |

Note: Post may contain affiliate links.

Easy process to buy physical gold bullion for the ultimate safety asset

Investing in physical gold is the ultimate safety asset but unless you’re Prospector Pete, you better know how to buy bullion.

In this video, I’ll show you the pros and cons of buying physical gold then reveal the platform I’m using to buy gold.

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Why Every Investor Needs to Buy Physical Gold

Nation, the 21^st century is shaping up to be a world of extreme risks! Hackers steal nearly $200 billion a year. Rogue nations are on the verge of getting the bomb…and we’re about that close to a virus turning us all into an episode of The Walking Dead!

You don’t have to be a doomsday prepper or be wearing a tinfoil hat to buy physical gold.

Gold is the ultimate store of value and safety asset. In a prior video, we looked at returns on the price of gold during the last two market crashes where gold jumped 19% on average against stocks that lost half their value.

But owning gold stocks and even the SPDR Gold Trust that tracks the spot price may not be enough. If your sole ownership in gold is through bits and bytes in an electronic account, a computerized transaction, then what happens to that safety when the financial system is targeted?

Cyberattacks are increasingly the work of nation-level hackers and what better way to strike a capitalist society than to go after its money?

When the institutions and exchanges go down, owning physical gold could be the only safe asset.

In this video, I’ll detail the pros and cons of buying physical gold. We’ll look at the costs to buy gold and different ways to buy bullion.

The video is in partnership with Vaulted, a platform that lets you invest directly in gold bars, with insured storage in the Royal Canadian Mint or physical delivery to your home. The gold is certified 99.99% pure and it took me less than a minute to set up an account and buy my first gold bar.

Buy physical gold bars on the Vaulted app – the app I use to invest

Towards the end of the video, I’ll show you why I’m using Vaulted to buy gold bars. You can store your gold at the Mint or take physical delivery and they’ve got a really cool gifting program, but I don’t want you to think it’s all about the platform. I first want you to come away with why physical gold should be a part of your plan for wealth protection and then YOU decide where to buy it.

Pros and Cons of Buying Gold?

Nation, I have to tell you, the direction of interest rates has really gotten me worried lately. Near zero rates might sound like a great idea but it turns the entire financial system on its head. Banks can’t make money with near-zero rates so they just sit on the cash, the economy grinds to a halt and about the only asset that does anything is gold.

Now we’ve talked about investing in gold through miners, ETFs and futures but physical gold adds that extra layer of protection. That’s one of the biggest pros here of buying bullion or even gold coins, safety from a collapse of the digital infrastructure or those institutions. It’s also an inflation hedge, and with interest rates, the cost of money down to nothing, you better believe inflation is coming back.

Now as we say in the Bow-Tie Nation, nothing is every all rainbows and unicorns. Cons of owning gold include the storage and insurance costs, which we’ll detail more in a bit. Physical gold doesn’t produce dividends like owning shares of the miners. There’s usually a premium or fee you pay to buy gold bullion and the IRS may tax your profits in gold as a collectible which is a higher rate than capital gains.

Beyond these cons though, I still feel better knowing I have that physical asset and the safety of gold.

How Much Does it Cost to Buy Gold Online?

So you’ve decided to buy physical gold and you do a Google search…and all you see are hundreds of shady dealers, all charging a different premium on the actual spot price.

Seriously, it took me half an hour to find this chart by VisualCapitalist on the average premium for buying gold and silver. That 4% average premium means if the current spot price of gold is $1,650 an ounce; you’re paying $1,716 to buy and only getting $1,584 an ounce to sell.

That kinda sucks and it makes it critical that you look around for the best platforms to buy gold. If you’re paying a 4% fee to buy and sell, plus an annual storage cost of maybe 1%, that means the price of your bullion has to increase nearly ten percent just to break even!

How to Buy Physical Gold Online

That’s why I was excited to talk to Vaulted’s Chief Operating Officer Tory Aggeler at a conference last year. Vaulted is a relatively new app but built by the McAlvany Financial Group and 48 years in the precious metals space. I had heard others talk about the app and its low 1.8% fee for buying and selling, about half the industry average.

McAlvany is one of the longest-operating full service gold brokerage firms in the U.S. and they’ve put together a solid app. Through the app or the website, which are both fully-encrypted for protection, you’re buying certified 99.99% pure gold bullion to be stored at the Royal Canadian Mint or delivered to your door.

You get that 1.8% rate buying and selling so total transaction fees are less than half the fees you’d pay at other gold brokers. To store your gold in the Mint, the platform charges a 0.4% annual management fee which is the same as the annual expense on the SPDR Gold Shares fund.

Now obviously I love that discount on the transaction fees. Buying gold can be expensive, but it was really the level of security why I started using Vaulted. The broker stores gold at the government-owned Mint. Holdings are audited every year by the government’s auditor general and insured by Lloyds of London.

Check out the Vaulted app and buy gold bars for protection and return!

So I want to go in here and show you how easy it was to open an account, it literally took me less than a minute. I’ll show you how to buy physical gold and I want to share a couple of unique features on the app including the gifting program.

After creating your account with some basic contact information, you’ll come over here to Transfer and link your checking account with the routing number and account number on your checks. Your account will be confirmed then click submit here and you’ll come to this screen for your first deposit.

I’ll make my deposit here, let’s do ten-thousand dollars, and click submit to have that go through.

Now, after your deposit gets confirmed, you’re ready to buy gold and like everything else on the app, it’s all set up to be as easy as possible. You can see your buying power and buy any amount within that. Now remember, you pay that 1.8% fee when buying so you’ll have slightly less buying power than what you deposited. So I’ll buy a thousand-dollars of gold here, submit and that’s it, it all works in a matter of seconds and you can see the gold in your account.

How to Gift Gold Bars to Someone

One of my favorite features on the app is this gifting program. You can gift any amount of gold to someone with just their name and email address. They’ll get an email, open an account and immediately have that gold in it. So let’s do $1500 of gold here and I’m going to gift it to a guy I know that rocks the bow-tie. I’ll put in the email and write out a quick message here…and boom, you’ve just made your friend a gold investor.

You can set up your account to deposit and buy gold regularly or just do it manually whenever you like. Your gold will be stored there in the vault and verified monthly. If you ever want delivery, Vaulted sends certified mail through Fedex next-day or two-day straight to your door.