Your gold is in a building in Delaware. Or Texas. Or a suburb of Salt Lake City.
You have never seen it. You will probably never see it. There is a decent chance you could not name the facility without checking a statement.
And it is not actually in your name. It is held in the name of your custodian, for the benefit of your IRA, which is a legal arrangement with more steps in it than most people realize when they sign.
None of that is sinister. It is how the rules require it to work, and the system is genuinely well built.
But it is worth understanding, because two words in your storage agreement determine your annual bill, and one question determines whether the metal you think you own is the metal sitting in that vault.
Let's open the door.