Precious Metals

I want to take a few minutes and talk about precious metals and what they are, maybe different versions of them and maybe how they could fit into your portfolio. First, let’s define what a precious metal even is. A precious metal is a rare, naturally occuring metallic chemical element of high economic value. Historically precious metals were important as currency, but now they’re regarded mainly as an investment and industrial commodity. So most commonly when we think of precious metals, what do we think of? Gold, right? Most people would say that. If you asked probably 10 people, I’m guessing nine of 10 would probably say that. The other common one is silver. That tends to be kind of number two, closely followed. But there’s a couple more that don’t get named that much, right? So those two out there are Platinum and Palladium, okay? Those four precious metals would make up what most people consider the four precious metals that are out there. And so when you’re looking at investing, maybe some people commonly go to gold or silver, but it’s interesting there’s a couple of more out there that are used in today’s world. You know the question is should you have them? Well before we get to that, let’s look at how do you get them? How do you own them, right? There’s various different ways you can actually own a precious metal. One, you simply have it in your hand, right? You have a gold bullion or a coin or even in silver, you have a big chuck of it or something like that. So I encourage you if you own that on your persons let’s call it. If you have it physically, that’s a great way to own something. But also there’s some elements of danger of having that right, when you physically own it. You can own it through the market, through an exchange traded fund or a lot of times you can have it through what they call a self-directed IRA with various companies that are involved to help you with that thing. But let’s say you have it on your person, please, please, please do that safely. Have it in a safe spot, a fire proof safe if you’re holding it in your house or something like that. And also make sure somebody knows where it’s at. The reason is let me give you a story. A good friend of mines friend, a friend of a friend here, had a lot of silver. And he was going in for a various serious surgery. He was a single gentleman and nobody knew where this was. He literally had his silver buried on his property and nobody knew where this was. So what he did was drew basically a treasure map for my friend so he was able to find this if something happened to him during this procedure. Folks, it makes you wonder right, is if people truly are doing this if there are some out there, I guess that’s why there are treasure hunters in today’s world, right? So folks if you have this, make sure it’s safe. Make sure people know where it’s at. And that way it gets passed on if it needs to be okay, if you’re doing it in person. So once again, how should you have this? It depends. People hold it for various different reasons, hedge against inflation, the economy, political war, stuff like that. So once again, diversification like anything, don’t own it all. You know once again. we would never encourage somebody to have one single investment in their whole portfolio. Maybe it’s a portion for various reasons. So once again, consider it, do your research on it. Make sure you’re doing it the correct way. And if you have additional questions give us a call. We’d love walk through it with you.