Investing in Your Retirement: How Can Precious Metals Help?

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During our working lives, we are often encouraged to think about our retirement and how we are going to pay for it. Traditionally, we are pushed towards putting savings into a pension pot, but there are now some other ways that you can put something aside for your old age, including making the most of some precious metals.

These provide more reliable growth than many other typical alternatives, and so they are growing in popularity with those who are looking into the future.

Investing in Your Retirement – How Can Precious Metals Help?

So, how do you invest in precious metals and which ones should you pick? Here, Joe Pannu, Managing Director of Wall Street Metals IRA, looks into what precious metal IRAs have to offer and how they work.

Precious metal IRAs

To invest in precious metals for your retirement, you will need an Individual Retirement Account. An Individual Retirement Account (IRA) allows you to save for your retirement with tax-free growth or on a tax-deferred basis.

As you cannot hold the physical precious metals in a regular IRA, specific precious metal IRAs have now been specifically designed for the task. These self-directed IRAs allow you to invest different assets but work in the same way as a normal IRA and have the same contribution limits.

Whilst other pension plans have a tendency to fluctuate in value over time, precious metals have typically grown in value over the long term. This can help to protect both your current and future wealth by protecting you against market volatility even in the face of an economic downturn.

This can be a very effective way to invest in your future, but it should not be the only way to do this. Investing 5%-10% of your retirement fund in a precious metal IRA avoids the risk of putting all of your eggs into one investment basket and protects you in the event of a dip in the value of these metals at a time when you need it.

Often, they do not perform in the same way as other assets such as stocks and cryptocurrency, so there may be other ways to make quicker and greater gains.

Which precious metals?

Which precious metals

A precious metal IRA can cover gold, silver, platinum and palladium as these offer historically reliable growth in value. However, the quality of these metals is very important, as there are certain standards that your precious metal investment needs to meet for your IRA.

Any gold needs to be 99.5% pure, silver should be 99.9% pure and platinum and palladium must be 99.95% pure. This can take different forms, but does not currently cover any rare or collectable coins. You should take advice on choosing the right metals for you based on the costs, the potential returns and the tax benefits that you can expect.

The investment into these metals should not be taken lightly as they can come with a host of extra fees for physical asset storage, custodial fees, and transaction fees to name just a few. You are not able to store any precious metals that you have invested in yourself as you may be subject to further taxes and penalties, not to mention the obvious added risk.

Investing in precious metals can be an effective way to save for your future. They can not only offer you a good return for your money as well as stability that many other investment methods are unable to compete with. Before making any investment, you should make sure that you take professional advice to ensure that this is an investment that will work with your plans and finances and that it is done safely and manageably.