Everybody researches the buy.
Premiums, purity, custodians, storage, which coin, which bar. People spend weeks on it.
Almost nobody researches the sell. Which is strange, because you are guaranteed to do it. Not maybe. Guaranteed. Either you need the money, or the calendar makes you, or your heirs do it for you.
And selling is where a gold IRA quietly hands back a chunk of whatever it earned.
There are four separate costs involved. Three of them are small and boring. One of them is enormous and invisible.
Most people budget for the boring three and get ambushed by the fourth.