how does one start buying gold?

that scarey thread about the minting of 2 trillion in new currency reminded me that I have long thought about getting started in buying gold but have no idea how to go about it. Am I going to end up with heavy bars that must be lugged around? Or should I think in terms of coins? How are those used? No supermarket, for example, will take them will they?

:blush:

Priceless!!

The price has gone up lately, it's @ $600 oz the last time i checked.

Gold bars I believe weigh 10lbs or more. 10lbs = 160 oz = $960,000 per bar. If you are worrying about lugging around gold, that's a problem I'd like to have.

@ $800.00 an ounce then......

I'm amazed there's still so much talk about it being a bulletproof investment then.

you will quickly learn my friend that the ONLY financial "advisors" who recommend gold are sellers of books, videos, newsletters on gold bug topics, or else they are actually selling various gold "investments" like coin, mining stock, etc. themselves

gold has an awful record in modern times, positively awful

my only satisfaction is that all the gold bugs of the 80s went through some very well-publicized bankruptcies, the least they deserve for all the bogus investment advice that caused everybody else to lose their money too!

gold is a terrible investment

and it's why I'm a little skittish about gold now...

and trade deficits at record highs, and rising, bankruptcies up, new home sales down, gap between rich and poor rising, rates rising, dollar weakening -- I seriously think this country is headed down the tubes.

The repigs are sapping us for every dollar they can get before they lose power.

Anxious to see some answers to your post...

I guess.

and ye won't get me gold!!!!!!!!!

I'm so sorry, it just fell outta my fingers....

From a fella part-irish....

Easier than bars,more expensive, as you pay for coinage. No, the market doesn't take gold---yet. We bought them as kind of insurance, not as an investment, also as border crossing aids if it ever comes to that

although you would be an idiot to try to pay for things with them at thier face value.

IIRC the 1oz gold coins have a face value of $10, my silver coins have a face value of $1.

You buy them because they're worth their weight in gold, if you'll pardon the expression. Generally speaking, as inflation goes up and the value of the dollar decreases, the value of gold per ounce increases. Thus, if you buy gold coins before the dollar's value deflates, you'll make money in real dollars even if the price of gold stays the same, and even more so if the price goes up -- which it almost invariably does as people like yourself buy gold in inflated times.

Make sense?


As for where to start, there's plenty of places that deal in precious metals. Monex.com and Usagold.com are both fairly reputable, from what I understand -- though don't take my word for it!

Canada and south Africa, even the U.S. sells gold coins, but you could check coin dealers in your area, plus even pawn shops.

buy old wedding bands (plain ones) at the pawn shop. they'll still cost you the equivlent of $600 an ounce but they are portable and easy to handle.

I have a bunch of gold nuggets and plain rings from my days in the Sierra Nevada. DH and I had all our old wedding rings melted down and just made into a small ingot

I have also collected quite a few pure silver coins over the last 5 years in my retail business. I could always tell when some kid took his dad's coin collection, i'd get several dollars worth of silver all at once in a couple days.

one day I was at the bank and noticed the teller had a bunch of pure silver dollars in her coin rack. she looked at me funny when I bought every single one of them :evilgrin:

reminds me of the law clerk in Great Expectations.

I haven't heard the commercial for a few days, may-be on her website??? :shrug:

Mining stocks are one way to do it, and gold futures are another.

Then again, you can get those heavy bars and store them under a fish pond in the back yard. Don't even THINK about a safe deposit box in a bank, HHS is authorized to rob those in time of national emergency.

Gold is the one commodity whose value remains constant in terms of purchasing power. When the price of gold goes up, you know you're living through an inflationary period. If it goes down, it's a deflationary period.

Gold can now be bought and sold openly and there are dealers who will do it. In case of national emergency, you have to find someone with something you need who is willing to take your gold in exchange. It wasn't a great deal during the Depression, as most episodes of Antiques Roadshow will tell you. Gold jewelry and accessories were often traded for meals.

To find dealers, just look under "Gold Exchange" or "Precious Metals Dealers" in the yellow pages in the nearest big city. Chances are there are more than one. My small city has several, but this is a big jewelry center. You can buy it in hundredweights (what a c-note will buy, by weight, per the previous day's close), by ounces, and by larger amounts. You can also generally buy the coins at these places.

ah, warpy, how can you say that to us who lived thru the 90s straight-faced?

Check it out.

You must have some sort of strange averaging thing going on to say that gold has any stability in purchasing power. Just the variation of the price of gold in dollars and the relative stability of dollar prices of just about everything belies that.




Clearly if gold is maintaning its purchasing power, then a troy ounce purchasing a basket of goods from 1980 would be the same as a troy ounce's purchasing basket of goods 2000. But we know that you could take the 1980 ounce, get five hundred 1980 dollars, and buy a lot more than you could taking the 2000 ounce, and getting 300 dollars. I haven't done the math on the change from year to year, but it's clear gold is all over the place in terms of dollars, and given that the purchasing price of the dollar has been a predictable inflation....

Mining has caused some huge superfund sites. Gold mining pretty much poisons everything around it with arsenic.

http://www.emannorth.ca/ic/ds023/status.cfm

Who gives a shit about the environment if we progressives can make a little money?

:eyes:

I'm investing in a little green energy here and there. Screw the gold at the current price for sure, not to mention that it can really affect the arsenic content of my wildcrafting of the herbs.

If the market falls, who's going to buy it?

at www.kitco.com or at www.everbank.com

You can have an individual or a pooled account but you actually do own the gold and can ask for delivery at any time, it's not just on paper. Haven't done it yet but I'm seriously thinking of doing it. Everbank also has cd's for gold. Guraranteed capital but you get the rise in price, it's for 5yrs I think. I've banked with them for a couple of years now, they are online not a brick and mortar bank, the rates are good and a real person answers the phones.

and it's FDIC insured.

though not a checking account. The CD rates are higher at everbank, they offer a lot of variety for international investing also.

They sell various types - you'll probably want the bullion coins, usually in 1 oz, 1/2 oz, 1/4 oz, and 1/10 oz denominations. US Eagles, Canadian Maple Leafs, etc.

If you can't afford that, then try silver, aka "the poor man's gold". They're also available as coins and as pre-1965 coins, aka "junk silver".

:bounce:

at $600 an oz I think gold is a bit out of reach for some people, myself included.

I do like silver though. I think of it more as metal for the masses, in that it is affordable for the average person to buy.

Also I feel that if times ever got so bad that our dollars were worthless that gold might not be too convienient to buy stuff with on a day to day basis. It would be better to have silver so you could make change and whatnot.

Real easy to purchase.

Silver is beginning to really take off. Any suggestion of buying stock in mines is worthless. Stocks are not worth the paper they are written on. I've been buying silver bullion for several years now. Storage is a problem, but it is easily negotiable and continues to gain value. Silver, unlike gold, is not only a precious metal, but it also has a tremendous industrial value. It is used in everything from pharmaceuticals to photographic paper. The annual demand is now surpassing the annual production. It can only rise.

Bullion coins are overpriced because of numismatic value tacked on. Old silver coins are a better deal. But bullion bars give you the most bang for the buck. Don't be fooled, there is no collector value in bars. It is strictly determined by weight. Even the government is now having to bid on ebay to purchase silver to mint their silver coins.

Edited for typo

that's another metal i've never been glad i purchased, even w. the current run-up in prices, it hardly makes up for the hassle of hauling its heavy ass around

it's a great conductor.

To really invest in the 24 karat element,
look for humanity that has been utterly disregarded,
loves caress for those, seen detested and irrelevant,
and gold in your hand, a yellow kiss rich in regard.

Joyous smile of another happy human being,
worth a million billion rocks in the vault,
where the scale weighs gold, look to the unseen,
if the heart does the job, gold is love without fault.

Just pray all 9 billion future populations,
want a mouthful of capped golden teeth agleen,
the price jumps up beyond wildest expectations,
a rich craven asset swapped above esteem.
Blessed thee; Lovely gold in every leaf and blossom,
Alchemy; wallmart plastic cheap rock bottom flotsam.

i am not going to tell you how because you will just get hurt, well, okay, that is rude, you can go to the coin shop and buy coin -- please not numismatic coin an area rife with fraud and fakes but just regular old american eagles or something that is purely traded for the gold content -- but you will be eaten alive by transaction costs since you pay fees to buy AND to sell

buy at the peak is not the way to make or preserve money anyway

the time to buy gold was when we had all given up on gold -- even so, the gold i held for the past 20 yrs, you know what? i would have done a lot better in CDs, for most of those years it did not a damn thing except cost me the money to store it, you can't look at a sudden volatile gain in a couple years, look at what it does over the decades, most of the time, nothing

when the prices are at all time highs.

Mutual funds and CDs are a decent place to stash cash.

Well researched, modest and timed and executed equity in your home is also a good investment.

... or some such thing...

And that the physical gold rarely, if ever, left the safety of whatever vault it was in.

That's pure assumption on my part tho - I have absolutely NO experience with gold acquisition.

a "certificate of ownership?"



the gold need not exist at all if you are happy w. a piece of paper, correct?

i have a radical idea, if we can trade based on faith put in pieces of paper, let's save the wear and tear on these old bones, and stick with paper money

i hope you know that i am just teasing

you can buy gold -- and you should insist on physical possession of the gold -- at coin dealers, thru u.s. mint, at auctions (well don't know if they do auctions any more but they did quite a few when the savings & loans failed)

I'm happy with the piece of paper I get monthly that tells me I own $10,000 in a bank account...

I don't insist on the "physical possession" there - or with stocks or with bonds or with.....

If my remark about gold is faith-based, then so is the entire financial industry.


EDIT: I just pulled the number 10,000 outta ass...

oh and not just a little happier

i've done way freakin better w. my paper than w. my gold

Read these two good articles.

This one addresses what to buy depending on you reason for buying gold
http://cmi-gold-silver.com/small-survival-gold-silver-coins.html
This one addresses myths and things like coins to avoid and bank/IRS reporting requirements.
http://cmi-gold-silver.com/gold-confiscation-1933.html


This site is convenient for keeping track of the 'spot price' of gold
the 'spread' is the amount over the spot price that you pay for a coin
http://www.kitco.com/

For survival it looks like U.S. gold/silver eagles are the best bet.
I am collecting the perth mint lunar series because they are limited editions even though they carry a premium of $20 (more for the 2000 Dragon) over the gold eagles.
I have been buying from local coin dealers but plan to start buying over the internet.
because there is way more selection and the (shipping cost and sales tax are a wash)
Good luck with your purchases.

and more affordable. Hell I've even thought of stockpiling salt and coffee.

I dont own any American Gold Eagles yet but I do have a small quanitity of 1oz American Silver Eagles.

I dont have enough money lying around that I could buy 1oz gold coins with gold at almost $600 an oz.

The near $11 an oz of silver is more reasonable to me though. Maybe later I'll pick up a few gold coins.

Very, very bad. Gold coin can often be found in pawn shops and should sell for market + 10%.Pawn shops will also sometimes sell you their scrap gold at market rate, but you've really got to know what you're doing.

Best site I know for gold can be found at kitco.com

a little at a time on ebay. Look for someone with a high feedback number.

I went out and dug around in my garden plot for a little while and came back to find a lot of info (some contradictory). I am getting a windfall this summer and have just been daydreaming about some things I am going to do with it. LAND, definitely, in Maine, with hardwood trees and a tiny house with woodburning stove. There might be enough left over to buy a couple of gold coins. Actually I have been collecting silver because I have always preferred it over gold to wear as jewelry so now I have a bunch of silver rings and some fairly heavy necklaces. At 60 I'm in a new "ring phase," trying to get at least one for every finger.
Thanks again for all the ideas and information, which I gather has been useful to others too.

some of which have been mentioned. One thing to consider:
Since the US-made coins still have legal tender status, they can be imported
and exported free of duty under US customs laws, if you are really into
the survivalist thing. Also, the old US gold coins, the ones that really
circulated, are available with fairly low premiums right now, if you don't go for
too high a grade of preservation--not the low premiums of the modern
stuff, but not too high nonetheless.

One company that handles more of that stuff than any other is Heritage
Galleries of Dallas, but they are mainly a wholesaler--they supply a lot
of the retailers you will see advertising, and their gold division is not
generally known to the retail public. They don't do Krugerrands or the
modern stuff, but if you want the 100-year old stuff, and will buy a
decent quantity of it, that is where the retailers go to get it.

You can safely invest in almost anything BUT gold.

Overseas real estate is a good investment, as is your own business.

in and around Germany these days (coming to you tonight live from Düsseldorf),
and real estate here is so sky-high that gold seems cheap by comparison, although
the German real estate is decidedly more pleasant to sleep in..........