Both are worth understanding before retirement money moves. The condition decides who holds the metal.
Most retirement money is not allowed to do what its owner wants. That is the assumption, anyway. An old 401(k) from a former employer, an IRA nobody has touched in years, and the settled belief that moving any of it into gold means selling, paying the IRS, and starting over.
So it sits where it is, in whatever the plan defaults to. About a third of the S&P 500 now sits in ten companies, and anyone holding an index fund holds that concentration whether they chose it or not.
The belief has been wrong since 1997. Federal law signed that year lets an IRA hold certain physical gold and silver meeting statutory requirements. A correctly executed direct rollover or trustee-to-trustee transfer can preserve the account's tax treatment, while an ineligible or incorrectly completed transaction can produce tax consequences.
The same law attaches a condition, and almost nobody selling gold leads with it.
A bank or an approved trustee has to hold the metal. It cannot sit in a safe at home. In 2021 the Tax Court ruled that gold coins kept in a personal safe counted as a taxable distribution, and an LLC in between did not save it.
So the gold gets held by somebody else. Choosing who is the entire decision, and it is the part of this transaction where retirement money is most often lost.
Two of these are settled law. The third changes daily and is quoted as of its stated date.
Every figure sourced to a named statute, court decision, regulator advisory or published index page.
It does not recommend a product, it does not predict the price of gold, and it does not require any knowledge of the metals market to read.
This is for people with an existing retirement account large enough that a serious market drawdown would change their plans. If that is not the situation, the brief will not be useful.