Ask a gold dealer how much gold you should own and you will get a number.
Ask ten gold dealers and you will get ten numbers, all of them larger than the last one you heard.
Ask a financial planner and you will get a shrug and something about five percent.
Ask the IRS and you will get silence, because the tax code has no opinion. There is no legal cap on how much of an IRA can sit in gold. You could put all of it there tomorrow.
That silence is the whole problem. When nothing stops you, the decision falls entirely on you, and most people make it by feel.
So let us do it differently. Not with a number handed down from someone selling something, but by working out what gold is actually for, what it costs to hold, and what happens to a retirement plan at each level of exposure.
By the end you will have your own number, and you will be able to say why.