A woman in Arizona opened a gold IRA with a hundred thousand dollars.
The fee schedule was clear and she read it carefully. Eighty dollars for setup. A hundred for the custodian. A hundred fifty for storage. Three hundred thirty dollars a year, disclosed, in writing.
She felt good about it. She had done her homework.
Two years later she asked a different dealer what her coins were worth. The answer came back around seventy two thousand dollars, with gold roughly where it started.
The fees were not the problem. She had paid about six hundred sixty dollars in fees.
The markup had taken twenty eight thousand.
That gap is the single most important thing to understand about buying gold in a retirement account, and almost nobody explains it, because the people explaining things are usually the people collecting it.