Bron Suchecki

Why Should I Own Gold?

In my previous job with the Perth Mint, I've sold gold to people with $10,000 through to $10 million. Why they buy I discuss at goldchat.blogspot.com/.... Why hold it long term? Insurance:

The way I like to think about this reason for buying gold is if you buy car insurance and then at the end of the year you have not had an accident, you don’t say to yourself “well that was a waste of money, I paid the premium and never got to claim on the insurance policy”. Instead you say “great, I didn’t have an accident, how lucky” and you write-off the premium. This is the same attitude these clients have towards gold – if the price goes down, they don’t moan about the money lost, they consider themselves lucky that there was no economic breakdown. They don’t want to make a lot of money out of gold, because in their view this means that they have lost all their other investments.

I did have a hard time being able to put myself in their shoes and understand where they were coming from until I dealt with this lovely lady who used to ring up every now and then to make sure we were still there and everything was OK. Where did she live? Israel. Might not sound rational, maybe there were better offshore places/ways to store her wealth, but having that gold save haven way over in Australia sure did make her sleep well at night.