Moving an account
Can this move without a tax bill?
A direct trustee-to-trustee transfer is not a taxable event. An indirect one is, the moment it misses the 60-day window. Every rule here is cited to the IRS publication it comes from.
Read the pageIndependent. We do not sell metal.
Run the numbers
before the sales call.
12 calculators, 13 live market trackers and gold prices going back to April 1968, so you can price a gold IRA rollover yourself instead of taking a dealer's quote on trust.
- 12 dealers priced on one identical account
- 13 market trackers, rebuilt on every deploy
- 0 customer ratings, because we have no customers
Fees and costs
What 12 dealers charge on the same $50,000
Every dealer here is priced on the same account, so the only thing that moves a row is what that dealer charges: the setup fee once, the dealer spread applied to the metal you buy, and the administration and storage charges multiplied out across 10 years of commingled storage. The order on this table is that arithmetic and nothing else, which means no dealer can pay to move up it and the ranking does not change when a commercial relationship does.
| # | Dealer | Setup | Annual | Storage | Spread | Minimum | 10-year total | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Goldco Lowest total | $50 | $80 | $100 | 5.0% | $25,000 | $4,350 | Published |
| 2 | Advantage Gold | $50 | $100 | $100 | 5.0% | $25,000 | $4,550 | Published |
| 3 | American Hartford Gold | $0 | $100 | $125 | 5.0% | $10,000 | $4,750 | Third party |
| 4 | Augusta Precious Metals | $50 | $125 | $100 | 5.0% | $50,000 | $4,800 | Third party |
| 5 | Birch Gold Group | $50 | $125 | $100 | 5.0% | $10,000 | $4,800 | Published |
| 6 | Preserve Gold | $50 | $125 | $100 | 5.0% | $10,000 | $4,800 | Third party |
| 7 | Noble Gold Investments | $80 | $125 | $100 | 5.0% | $20,000 | $4,830 | Third party |
| 8 | Lear Capital | $280 | $200 | $100 | 5.0% | $7,500 | $5,780 | Third party |
Published means the dealer prints the figure. Third party means it comes from a custodian schedule or a filing and the dealer has not confirmed it. A dealer that publishes nothing looks cheap on this model, which is a gap in the data rather than a finding about the dealer.
Start here
The two questions people arrive with
Readers arrive at this category from one of two places: they are moving an existing retirement account and want to know whether it can move without triggering a tax bill, or they have been quoted a price and want to know whether that price is reasonable. The two pages below take those in turn, and the market data beside them is the same series every figure on this site is checked against.
Work it out
12 calculators, one question each
Each one answers a single question you would otherwise have to take a salesperson's word on, and every calculation runs inside your own browser rather than on our server, which means the figures you type are never sent anywhere, no calculator asks for an email before it will show you a number, and no dealer receives what you entered.
- Gold IRA fee calculator What will this account cost me to open and hold? Open the calculator
- Coin premium calculator Is this coin quote fair against the spot price? Open the calculator
- Rollover eligibility checker Can my account actually move, and by which route? Open the calculator
- Allocation calculator How much of a portfolio would this be? Open the calculator
- RMD calculator What will I have to take out, and when? Open the calculator
- Inflation calculator What is a past gold price worth in today's money? Open the calculator
What goes wrong
The complaints in this category follow a small number of repeating shapes, and most of them turn on price rather than fraud. A coin sold at a large markup over its metal content is legal, it clears every disclosure requirement, and it can still cost more than a decade of account fees. We publish the patterns, the enforcement record, and the questions that surface a markup before you agree to anything.
How this site makes money
Some links to dealers earn us a commission when a reader opens an account. That pays for the research, and it is the only way this site earns.
A commission never buys a ranking, a score, or a place on a list, and no company has been given a preview of what we publish about it. Where a page carries a paid link, the disclosure sits at the top of that page rather than in the footer.
We do not sell metal, hold accounts, or take a fee from you. We are not a dealer, a custodian, a broker or an adviser, and nothing here is investment, tax or legal advice.