Buying Gold Sovereigns

KingKenny

bowlhead99 wrote: »

It doesn't boost your 'income' because you are just paying yourself with your own money.

But yes, the result is you would obtain extra means-tested benefits if you were to illegally under-declare your liquid assets - hiding your cash to obtain benefits designed for people with less wealth. You could have a good laugh with your mates down the local legion about how you're sticking it to the man - and then live in perpetual fear of one of them dobbing you in.

Gold may or may not hold its value against inflation in future - over some periods it has, and others it hasn't. I am sure some people would try the wheeze.

What is clear is that if you are a relative pauper with a pension income level below the council tax credit / pension credit cut off points, £100k will be a lot of money to you. It would be a shame if it went missing in a casual burglary, or got lost in the aftermath of a house fire.

Or maybe someone followed you home from the pawnbroker one month, forced his way through your front door behind you, and threatened you with a baseball bat until you told him which cookie jar the coins were in. Then after finding them, beat you to death so you wouldn't report him to the police. No paper trail that anything was ever stolen, because as far as anyone knows, you didn't have a secret 100k of gold stashed in the cookie jar; all your benefit claims show you have minimal assets. Sounds pretty nasty, but some of the public who had been defrauded by your benefit cheating would probably clap and say you had it coming, live by the sword die by the sword etc.

Cheers Buddy.


I was only posting about conversations overheard down the local Legion.



What you outline, well pretty scary stuff.


:beer:

Tom99

What type of gold coin/bar would give you the cheapest buy/sell spread and what is the likely %age buy/sell loss.
So for example would 1 small coin give you a 10% loss but a £10,000 bar a 1% loss.

dboswell

I would say the liquidity of gold coins is relatively good once you navigate the spread difference.

bowlhead99

Tom99 wrote: »

What type of gold coin/bar would give you the cheapest buy/sell spread and what is the likely %age buy/sell loss.
So for example would 1 small coin give you a 10% loss but a £10,000 bar a 1% loss.

If you follow some of the links above you can see examples. For example buying sovs at Elm Investments, it's £232 to buy but you only get £219 if you sell it back to them. A 5.6% loss, same as buying a half sovereign for 116 and selling for 109.

On same site at same time, if you wanted to buy a Krugerrand for 974 you could sell it for 924 which is only a 5.1% loss. Krugers are popular and liquid to trade, but not UK currency though so there is CGT on that route. 1/10th Krugers are 99 to buy and 92 to sell so more like a 7% spread.



Generally the spread is driven by liquidity, but a further factor is that the coin deaaler would find it more hassle to sell you ten 1/10th Krugererrands on ten occasions, than one 1oz coin that he has to hand, so the effort is priced accordingly (plus maybe people wanting to buy small denominations to tuck away and store / sell-on flexibly can drive the price higher than just buying one big coin).

However, if you are buying multiples of anything you will typically get a better price than buying singles of that thing.

markj113

Gold is extremely liquid, a dealer will pretty much buy any quantity at just below spot price. I have previously walked into a dealer with around £60k worth of gold, they were checked for authenticity which takes seconds per coin and the money was in my account within 2 hours.

Tom99 wrote: »

What type of gold coin/bar would give you the cheapest buy/sell spread and what is the likely %age buy/sell loss.
So for example would 1 small coin give you a 10% loss but a £10,000 bar a 1% loss.

Its a little more complicated than that. Standard bullion coins can be purchased from as little as 1.5% over spot. A dealer will offer around 2% under spot. You can sell privately for a little more.


Coins that have collectable value stand to increase above and beyond gold spot value. Coins such as Chinese Panda's and the new royal mint queens beasts series are doing well with earlier releases increasing above spot and original sale value.

DiggerUK

henryandmay wrote: »

Once one has purchased such item, where would you keep them? At home or would you pay a bank to keep them.........

ColdIron wrote: »

...........Few banks provide safety deposit boxes now, Metro Bank will but the costs can be prohibitive.......

https://www.metrobankonline.co.uk/safe-deposit-boxes/

We keep the grandkids awake at night telling them scare stories about owning gold, they haven't found out that a block of gold the size of a box of tissues is worth 400k.

We used deed boxes at HSBC, they were the last high street bank to offer such a service. We had a joint account which we transferred to Metrobank, reason being they had safety box storage.
Home insurance works out at a cost of £1 per £631 cover, our policy allows for a rise in price of 15.5% over what we declared. (why 15.5%?)..._

Flobberchops

I second Hatton Garden Metals. Used them recently as having done a little research they seemed to offer the best price for Sovereigns. Fast and businesslike service, was happy with the coins they provided.



Just bear in mind they only accept cash or bank transfer - presumably accepting card payments would expose them to chargeback fraud.

tommyboyd

Because each Gold Sovereign can be claimed as an individual item I am wondering if they covered by your basic household content insurance?

I am worried about a caveat in my own insurance that states it will not cover the theft of 'money'

Anyone here using content insurance for their sovereigns?

ColdIron

I tried many years ago and if they weren't a 'collection' (which they struggled to define) they weren't interested

tommyboyd

If the insurance company considers sovereigns as 'money' then they will consider the total amount as a single claim and thus exceeding the
£1500 limit but I am hoping each sovereign is considered an individual item and there is no limit on the number covered.

Anyone have any experience on how insurance companies treat sovereigns?