Where and How to Buy Tax and Duty Free 24K Pure Gold?
The number one enemy of a person who saves their wealth/money through savings account or time deposit is inflation. Because of inflation, money losses its purchasing power as time goes by. Inflation could be caused by either increasing prices of commodities and services, or over supply of money printed by the central banks.
Many professional investors say that the value of the money that you are holding right now can be stored to gold instead of paper money to keep the value of your wealth. You can do this by purchasing and owning gold bars. Gold does not loss its value, besides; its price is generally trending upwards.
So, the question now is how to purchase a gold bar;
1. If you just want to convert the value of your money into the value of gold, you could just buy shares of Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) that track the value of gold. Example of such ETFs is NYSE:GLD. In this type of investment, you don’t physically hold gold bar but the value of your wealth is synchronized or stored to the value of gold. This is a very liquid market so buying and selling is very easy. You have to have a stock broker if you want to do this. A minimum investment of, maybe, less than $100 can already buy you a Gold ETF share, but don’t forget the brokers commission.
2. You could also buy gold at gold storage and keeping companies like Bullionvault and Goldmoney. Here, you own a physical gold but it is stored and managed by BullionVault or Goldmoney, usually in Switzerland, London or New York. These companies claim that your gold is securely stored by a professional storage company and it is also insured, thus, you have to pay monthly storage and insurance fee. Here, you could buy and sell gold at a market price. You could buy as little as 1 gram of Gold; that is around $31 (based on current price of gold) plus commission.
3. You could also buy and own gold for a short time, hoping that you could sell the gold that you bought within a short period of time. That is, you could invest in the Futures market. In Futures market, you don’t own a physical gold but you own a contract of gold delivery that is why it has expiration date; because if you did not sell the contract before the expiration date, you will receive a physical gold in your house. Of course, brokers can manage this by forcing you to sell your contract prior to the expiration date and buy you new contract at uncertain price. This is not advisable for long term holding of gold but if you want to do this, you have to have a broker; most FOREX brokers offer this service. Trading in futures market is usually leveraged so you could buy huge quantity of gold using as little as maybe $50.
4. Of course, you could buy a physical gold in your own, that is, you hold a physical gold and you store it by yourself; no need for a broker. But how and where can you buy one? Well the store is just next door – ebay. There are some individual there that sell 24k gold bar at a price slightly higher than market price. Minimum price quantity is around $40 equivalent to 1 gram. The higher gram you buy, the closer it is to the market price. Most of these gold bars are produced from Turkey. You could also visit turkishoping.com for gold bar shopping. Gold bars are delivered through snail mail for free (also tax free and duty free) and payments can be made through paypal or credit card.
It is not advisable to buy gold in physical shops and stores in your country because its price is very much higher than the market price due to taxes, commissions, and premiums.
Filed in: Money and Investing, Other Investments
Local date: March, 2010