According to the IRS, you can’t take a payout from your Gold IRA until you’re 59 ½ years old. At this point, you must pay any applicable income taxes on all withdrawals, and you can liquidate the metals in your account for cash or take physical possession of them without penalty. Gold IRA plans are usually self-directed IRAs, which allow for more diverse investments than a traditional IRA. With both rollover options, you must also ensure that you meet any specific rollover requirements the company has.
Although Gold IRA is the most common name, that doesn’t mean the plan only allows you to buy gold. If you deposit the money to another IRA and then try another rollover within 12 months, the payout is immediately taxable. For example, a spouse who inherits an IRA and has many years until they reach RMD age may consider transferring those assets to their own IRA. A gold IRA was made possible by the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 and is a type of long-term retirement account in which a custodian bank stores precious metals for the account holder
.
Thankfully, the original owners of Roth IRAs are exempt from the RMD rules, but beneficiaries who inherit a Roth IRA are generally required to accept distributions, and those rules depend on several factors. Your custodian bank can refer you to an approved institution and process the gold transfer as part of setting up your Gold IRA. Gold IRA rules require that you store eligible precious metals with a national depositary, bank, or IRS-approved external trustee. While you can take out exposure to gold in a normal retirement account by owning stocks or funds, you can’t hold the physical asset in an IRA or a 401 (k)
.
With an indirect rollover, you have 60 days from the date you receive the money to transfer the money to your custodian bank or Gold IRA company. In a regular IRA, you can’t own physical gold, although you can invest in a wide variety of assets that are invested in gold, such as gold stocks or gold ETFs. Switching from a traditional IRA to a Roth IRA can make sense if you think you’ll be in a higher tax bracket when you start the payout, you can pay the conversion tax from outside sources, and you have a relatively long time horizon before assets can potentially grow. The IRS does not allow popular gold coins such as the South African Krugerrand or British state coins to be stored in
a gold IRA.
If you’re looking for a new target for the funds in your 401 (k) and you want something that doesn’t exactly follow the stock market or the economy, then an IRA rollover of 401 (k) on gold could be a good option. These investments are available in a normal brokerage IRA, meaning you wouldn’t have to go through the work and additional costs of setting up a self-directed gold IRA
.
