USAGOLD note: The Wall Street Journal reported Friday of a tax court ruling stating that a couple’s home storage of IRA gold coins constituted “unfettered control” – something not permitted under the law. In the case of a Utah couple, it triggered “taxes of nearly $270,000 on about $730,000 of IRA assets, plus penalties likely to exceed $50,000.”
We have had a warning posted at the USAGOLD website for several years about the dangers of home storage of IRA gold and silver, otherwise known and promoted as checkbook IRAs:
“… Equity Trust, one of the top administrators for self-directed retirement plans, tells why converting to a self-stored, precious metals LLC-IRA might be one of the more costly, dangerous and unnerving strategies you could undertake with your retirement nest egg.
For our part, we at USAGOLD see the checkbook IRA as a risky, problematic approach to precious metals retirement planning and a bad choice for our clientele. The traditional self-directed IRA account placed with a solid trust company is still the safest avenue for the retirement investor and is most likely to deliver the intended results.
Note: After posting this page, the Wall Street Journal published an article (9/2/16) stating that the “IRS has issued a stern warning” against personal storage of IRA gold holdings. The IRS, says the WSJ, “warns taxpayers to be wary of anyone claiming that precious metals held in your IRA can be stored at home or in a safe-deposit box.”
(Excerpted from The trouble with gold and silver checkbook IRAs.)
