Just like you want a local bank account or checking account so you have instant access to funds, if it is an issue for you a few gold coins can be held in a wall in your house. If I had that mentality though, I would stock up on soap, toothpaste, toilet paper, and cigarettes. They will have more value when the world is going to pot. People will not want gold at such times but be looking to buy something with the gold.

No good choices here. The main argument for holding stocks vs. gold in the shelter is the gold doesn’t have interest or dividends that need to be sheltered constantly. You only pay gains when you sell. The other problem with gold in the IRA is you lose access to it as it must be held by a custodian. This is an issue for those that want closer control of physical bullion such as in a bank.

In a taxable account the gains are taxed at your ordinary rate. In an IRA they are sheltered.

If the choice was a stock fund in a taxable account or a gold fund with the other in an IRA I would put the gold fund in the IRA

Your knowledge is an incredible resource.

I’ve installed a plug-in that will allow you to subscribe to comments. Also you can subscribe to the RSS feed of a comment by clicking the link at the top of the comment thread.

I like the idea of holding something I can liquidate offshore but I don’t think I have enough value to warrant taking a trip to Zurich and paying for a custodian to hold it for me.

GoldMoney and Bullionvault are both so new that I’m leery – seems too good to be true. It I might feel different if I could walk in and see it. Odd that I feel this way about gold but not other assets. But it does seem like it would make rebalancing very simple with a service like this, especially if you were all/mostly taxable. I’m not keen about driving with a couple thou worth of golden eagles to a shop across town when I would need to rebalance, shipping it out insured ,etc.

At any rate I think I’ll hold my initial locally and keep researching offshore.

This blog and the bogleheads thread were so educational. I’ve started listening to the HB money talk shows as well.

This all addresses a lot of concerns/thoughts I’ve had with asset allocation/diversification over the past few years in a nice package, and really cuts out a lot of the management fees that have been gnawing at me.

PS a nice blog feature would a notification of new comments to a thread – JD has something similar up over at Get Rich Slowly.

You have too many questions for me to address in a comment section. Let me give a short response.

Harry Browne advocated holding gold bullion. This has some logistical problems when you reach a certain level. In general, you should hold some gold bullion coins that you can closely control in a safe location such as a safe deposit box or other area you know is secure. These are assets that you can have “just in case” you needed to get to them quickly.

Then comes a time when you simply cannot hold the gold in such a way. For instance someone with a very large portfolio probably wouldn’t be able to stuff hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gold into a safe deposit box easily. At this point, you probably need to work with a bank that can handle this for you in a secure manner.

Harry Browne advocated keeping some gold in segregated storage in a safe country like Switzerland. Unfortunately since his death in 2006 many things have changed and it has become much harder for Americans to work with overseas banks.

My conclusion now is that I don’t have a good answer for you. The situation is changing fairly rapidly and I don’t have a solid workable option for people who want to store gold offshore. There are some services that are claiming to do this for you such as goldmoney.com and bullionvault.com. I have no experience with these services, but others have been using them and claim they are working fine. My main concern is how the gold assets are insured, protected, and how your claims against them are handled. But perhaps this is not such a great concern considering the alternatives right now.

Don’t hold gold in a retirement account if you don’t have to. For one, you are wasting space because it has no interest or dividends that need sheltering like bonds, cash and stocks. Secondly, gold is an asset of last resort and you don’t want a bunch of people and pieces of paper between you and it if something bad were to happen in the economy.

I would love seeing a post seeing how you address functionally how you manage your portfolio.

1) What is the he process in which you invest in physical gold? Is a certain percentage kept in a safe deposit box or do you hold everything in a registered vault?
2) The process in which you hold assets in an international account, as well as the asset classes held.

Do you combine the 2? Does it make sense to have your 25% of Gold all held offshore, for example, like in London or Switzerland? I assume that this cannot be accomplished within an IRA structure?

Also what challenges are presented when you are rebalancing out of t?

Do you hold some gold in an IRA? If so what brokerage are you using?

Everything I’m stumbling across in google searches seems very stilted (ie advertising a gold vendor or investment services).

I know there are lot of different outcomes here based on an individuals specific situation but I think it would make an interesting post if you laid out how you are managing your permanent portfolio.