Two gold coins sit on a table.
Both are one ounce. Both are gold. One of them can go in your IRA. The other one cannot, and if a salesperson talks you into it anyway, the IRS may treat your entire retirement account as distributed.
Welcome to one of the strangest corners of the tax code, where a purer coin can be forbidden while a less pure one is explicitly permitted, because Congress wrote a list instead of a standard.
So yes, you can buy gold coins with an IRA. You can buy some of them. And the gap between what is eligible and what gets sold hardest is where an enormous amount of money quietly disappears.
Let's go through the list, then the part that costs more than the rules do.