Planning for retirement is never easy, it forces people to think about the future and to set aside for when they stop working. It is normal for the average person to struggle with this that is why most people seek the advice of an investment professional.
During times of great uncertainty, investing for the future becomes even harder and scarier. But you must prepare now, no matter what the future brings, and it all starts with having a plan.
If you speak with a financial planner, they are likely to tell you about the benefits of investing in precious metals. While there are many benefits to precious metals one of the biggest is the diversification it provides to a portfolio. Most investors have very concentrated portfolios in stocks and bonds, that all go up and down in tandem. Gold and silver behave differently than traditional financial assets, and that is why you want them to balance out your portfolio.
Gold and silver have always been popular, whereas precious metals like platinum and palladium are newer and have smaller markets, gold and silver have been valued for thousands of years.
Not only have gold and silver historically been used for payments, but they also have a large market as jewelry and collectibles. But their use cases don’t just end there. They also have industrial purposes such as the building of cars and even electronic equipment and much more.
We point this out to say that they are many reasons to own gold and silver and they have market demands from many different people and industries.
Governments have also been large holders of gold and silver. Many countries have official government mints that melt down these metals, purify them and turn them into coinage. If they are good enough and valuable enough for governments, then they are also valuable for the average investor. To learn more about the advantages of investing in gold, you may want to read this Advantage Gold review.
Diversification
It does not matter if you like gold and silver as a hedge to protect against inflation or as a way to boost the returns on your investment. To construct a balanced portfolio, you want many different asset classes, like stocks, bonds, real estate, and precious metals.
The various groups of asset classes act as a balance against the others. The main point of diversification is to prevent you from experiencing a catastrophic loss. When one asset class goes down, the other goes up, and vice versa. What you don’t want is your entire portfolio going up and down, at the same time. If this happens, that means you are taking on way too much risk.
Reducing risk through asset diversification is something all the best investors do. Plus you have the added benefit of the fact that gold has never gone to zero, ever. Stocks and bonds go to zero often.
When you zoom out and look at a 100 or 200-year chart of the price of gold, you’ll see that it does a good job of keeping up with inflation. There are times when it lags, and also times when gold is overvalued and rises faster than inflation, but over the long haul, gold does the job that investors most want it to do.
Plenty of Liquidity
What is liquidity, and how does that affect your portfolio? Liquidity is how often an asset trades, or exchanges hands. Another way to think of liquidity is how easy is it to convert this asset into cash? Well, the gold and silver metals market is a massive global market. There are countless buyers and sellers at all times. So if you need to sell your gold and silver to raise cash, you will have no problem doing so, and your sales will not affect the market because the market is so big.
Another option to access liquidity if you have physical precious metals is to go to where you bought them from. Nearly every retailer of gold and silver has a buyback program. You will always be able to find buyers for gold because gold is money, and everyone uses money.
Lots of Demand
The governments of the world are falling apart. War is on the horizon. When chaos and uncertainty reign, investors seek out safe havens for capital in which to ride out the storm, and there is no better asset for this than gold and silver.
In a world of endless money printing, there is a huge wave of demand for real assets. Financial paper assets have dominated the last century, but the era of financialization is coming to an end. Investors want something that is real and can not be duplicated simply by hitting a button on a computer. Investors who have never bought gold before, are suddenly seeing the benefits of this ancient yellow metal.
Not only is there this mega-trend of the end of financialization, but gold historically goes on bull runs that last a decade. And this decade will be the bull run to end all bull market runs in gold.
And finally, one more catalyst for rising gold demand is the insanity of governments. In Canada, the government started attacking the people simply for traveling to the nation’s capital. The Canadian people were horrified, they’d never seen anything like this. The government stole all their money and banned their ability to make money or even pay for anything. What did this do? This drove massive amounts of individuals to find the nearest precious metals dealer and buy as much gold as they could. Many Canadians bought gold for the first time because of the reckless actions of their government.
Inflation Protection
Investors have been walloped by inflation. Many investors were not even in the market in the late 70s and early 80s the last time we had any real inflation. During this time many investors adopted Warren Buffett’s idea that gold was trash, just a shiny rock. Well, that is easy to say when there is no inflation. Now with interest rates skyrocketing within a matter of two months, the prices of food rising 30% in a year, and the prices of new cars are out of sight, investors are experiencing the fear of inflation for the first time.
And low and behold, they are realizing that gold and silver are a great way to combat inflation. What’s old is new again! This is one of many reasons why gold has been valued by humans for over 5,000 years. The same problems keep happening and gold has experienced all of these problems, many times. Every government loves to print money until everything collapses. Gold has outlasted every government ever.
As bad as the world seems right now, you have a good option, you can purchase gold and silver. All the bad things for humanity, are good things, major catalysts that will drive the price of precious metals higher. If you don’t have a significant amount of your portfolio in gold and silver assets, you need to make a change right now. There is still a long time to go to ride out this financial storm, and you can rest a bit easier if you have some gold and silver.