Gold IRA: The Secret to a Secure Retirement Plan

Gold, Silver and
Platinum – Part of a
Well-Balanced Portfolio

Why should you include precious metals in your retirement plan? Experts believe that gold and other precious metals are wise investments because, historically, they have been one of the few ways to protect assets from high inflation and economic uncertainty.

What Influences the Price of Gold?

Gold has been referred to as the crisis commodity because it tends to appreciate in value in response to negative economic, monetary, or political conditions.

Trends such as those listed below that weaken paper investments usually cause the price of gold to rise:

• Rising inflation
• Weakness in the U.S. dollar
• Rising interest rates
• Budget deficits
• Oil price shocks
• Stock and bond market turmoil
• Inflation
• Bank failures
• International loan defaults
• World tensions

Platinum: The Rarest Precious Metal

Most investors are very familiar with gold's history as a portfolio diversifier and hedge against crisis and inflation. However, there’s another precious metal that offers significant wealth preservation characteristics – platinum.

Platinum is scarce, 15 times more scarce than gold. It is extremely expensive to produce. All the platinum ever mined would fit in a cube less than 25 feet on each side.

It is also one of the most essential industrial commodities in the world. Because of its remarkable properties, industry is constantly finding new uses for it. In addition to robust demand from the automobile industry, platinum is also indispensable in the production of jewelry, fertilizers, fiber-optic cable, anti-cancer drugs, pacemakers, eyeglasses, gasoline, and more. Therefore, its price has often appreciated in all phases of economic growth, inflationary or otherwise.

A Secure Addition to Your Investment Portfolio

Because platinum is used in such a wide variety of industrial applications, platinum prices tend to rise sooner in the economic cycle than gold.

As an investment, platinum can help reduce the volatility of your overall portfolio because it has no significant correlation to stocks, bonds, or currencies. It tends to be more volatile than gold, having outpaced it in the 1979-1980 inflation and crisis-driven bull market in hard assets, when it became the only precious metal to exceed $1,000 per ounce.

Silver: The Indispensable Metal

Man's fascination with silver dates back over 6,000 years. Silver has been used as money for over 2,000 years and has endured centuries of economic and political crisis, always emerging as a universally accepted currency and store of value.

The price of silver is closely connected to factors related to the value of the U.S. dollar, the rate of inflation, monetary policy, and interest rates. When there is movement in these areas, there is also movement in the price of silver.

No other metal has such significant demand rooted in so many diverse sectors. For this reason, silver is no longer known as just a precious metal, a store of value, a work of art, or an industrial metal. It is all of these. Today silver is indispensable.

Read More... Add a recession-proof asset to your IRA - Gold >