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Precious metals can provide a safe long-term investment. While not a liquid asset, precious coins or bullion bars can provide an anchor for a reliable investment portfolio.
Choosing a reputable gold dealer can make or break your investment. In this article, we’ll consider Great American Gold Inc, reviewing the company and its legitimacy.
Conduct a due diligence check before investing with any company. Get started by reading our review of Great American Gold Inc.
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What is the Great American Gold, Inc.?
Incorporated on December 18, 2018, the Los Angeles, California firm Great American Gold Inc. offers gold individual retirement accounts (IRAs) and sells precious metal coins of gold, silver, platinum, and palladium.
The company maintains physical offices for its 10 employees at:
1605 W Olympic Blvd #850
Los Angeles, CA 90015-3861
It also maintains an e-commerce website that allows customers to open IRAs remotely. Its webpages for gold, silver, platinum, and palladium coins return a 403 error, which is not good.
The company offers a toll-free phone number, 888-465-3006, for those who dislike using the Internet or want to purchase items that would presumably be on the non-functional site pages.
According to Yelp, the Better Business Bureau, and the Chamber of Commerce, Great American Gold Inc. offers a wide range of products.
Many of the company’s web pages on the site do not work though, so you can’t read the information about what the company says it offers. The webpage to open a gold IRA does function.
Open for only a few years, Great American Gold Inc. has yet to build a good reputation in the industry. Because its website only partially loads, we can’t verify some information, such as their shipping policy.
According to some reviews on all three of the consumer watchdog sites, nearly half of their customers who review services did not receive items they ordered and which they had prepaid for the order.
Great American Gold Inc. Precious Metals Offerings
According to its website, Great American Gold Inc. sells and buys physical bullion and offers a gold IRA. Let’s consider the options the website and consumer watchdog groups state the company offers.
Although its website menu offers a link to a palladium page, it won’t load. By navigating the website using the site map, we discovered that the site no longer contains a palladium coins sales page.
It only offers an educational page on the benefits of investing in palladium.
According to various consumer reviews, the company did offer platinum coins at some time in the past. Its webpage for purchasing these items no longer loads. The website does still include an educational page on why you’d want to invest in platinum.
The Great American Gold website offers two web pages for silver purchases, the silver bars and coins page and the silver eagle coins page. Neither page includes prices and the order buttons have been removed although some of the raw HTML still shows.
Great American Gold’s web pages relating to gold bars and coin purchases also no longer load properly. The gold bars and coins page, gold buffalo coins page, and the gold eagle coins page all lack purchase buttons now and have raw HTML showing.
How do Precious Metals Help Protect a Retirement Portfolio?
Precious metals, such as gold and silver, can help protect a retirement portfolio in several ways.
One is through diversification. If a significant portion of a portfolio is invested in stocks, for example, the value of the portfolio may be significantly affected by changes in the stock market.
Adding investments in precious metals can help to spread risk among multiple asset classes and potentially reduce overall portfolio risk.
Another way precious metals can help protect a portfolio is by acting as a hedge against inflation. Historically, the prices of precious metals tend to increase when the value of paper currency decreases, which can happen during periods of high inflation.
Precious metals also tend to be less volatile than other investments such as stocks and bonds, which may provide a sense of stability during times of market turmoil.
It's important to note that precious metals shouldn't make up the majority of a portfolio, they should be used to diversify it, the reason being that their values tend to fluctuate independently of other asset classes, including stocks and bonds, and therefore adding to a portfolio in such a way that is not correlated to other assets in it.
Precious Metals IRA
An IRA that holds physical precious metals, also known as a precious metals IRA, is a type of individual retirement account that allows the investor to hold and invest in physical precious metals, such as gold, silver, platinum, and palladium, instead of, or in addition to, traditional assets such as stocks, bonds, and cash.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has specific rules that govern precious metals IRAs. The IRS only allows certain types of metals to be held in an IRA, such as gold, silver, platinum, and palladium, and these metals must meet specific fineness requirements.
Additionally, the IRS has rules about how and where the precious metals must be stored, and only certain types of custodians are allowed to hold precious metals in an IRA.
To set up a precious metals IRA, an individual typically opens a self-directed IRA with a custodian that specializes in holding precious metals.
The individual then funds the account with cash or by transferring assets from an existing IRA or employer-sponsored retirement plan.
Once the account is funded, the individual can use the cash to purchase precious metals that meet the IRS guidelines, which are then held by the custodian on the individual's behalf.
Great American Gold Inc. Payment Method
The website indicates that it accepts Mastercard, Visa, and American Express as the only forms of payment for non-IRA purchases.
According to the company’s website, to invest in an IRA, you would need to fund the account using either the IRA rollover method or phone the company for directions on how to fund a new IRA.
How Great American Gold Inc. Works
According to its customers, Great American Gold Inc. doesn’t work. Of its 31 reviews on the Chamber of Commerce website, 13 rated the company a “one” out of five possible stars. The company ranks a three-star among five possible stars.
The major issues cited include missing coins, non-delivery of bars and coins purchased, and bid-ask prices not in line with actual trading values.
On Yelp, the company has one review with an addendum which Yelp counts as two ratings. Initially, it received one star, but the company then fixed the complainant’s issue and the individual improved the rating to a five-star one.
On its Better Business Bureau page, the company has only two reviews – both negative. The company did not go through the BBB accreditation process and it has not adequately responded to customer complaints to maintain its rating.
The BBB rates the company a C+ because of its “failure to respond to 2 complaints filed against business.”
How to Buy Precious Metals from Great American Gold Inc.
If you decide to do business with Great American Gold Inc. you’ll have to phone them. No online purchases function any longer except the one for starting an IRA.
You must use a major credit card to make purchases although the company used to accept checks, according to some reviews against the company.
Great American Gold Inc. Shipping
This company does not make public its shipping policies. It only mentions shipping in two sentences in its frequently asked questions (FAQ) area. According to the FAQ, shipping may take between 14 to 28 days.
Great American Gold Inc. Customer Support
The company FAQ also briefly mentions its customer service department. It does not offer the hours of operation but does list a toll-free phone number - 888-465-3006. You can also email the company at [email protected].
Is Great American Gold Inc. a Scam or Legit?
We cannot say the company is a scam. While most of the companies we review check out, it seems Great American Gold Inc. does not treat its customers as well as it should.
Too many people across consumer watchdog sites have complained in the three short years the company has operated for this to come down to anything except something that does not seem right.
The company does not offer prices on its website. Most of the pages of the website don’t load. The firm’s customers state that their toll-free number rarely picks up their calls.
One customer claims to have rolled over an IRA valued at more than $145,000 and received roughly $47,000 of gold for it, although we can not prove this.
Your purchase of precious metals, whether bars or coins, should equal a dollar-for-dollar investment. This firm does not publicize its fees or setup costs.
Conclusion
Great American Gold Inc. does not even go to the trouble of imitating a good precious metals company since it did such a shoddy job on its website.
The firm doesn’t even include accurate IRS information, so it is probably not a good idea to rely on its educational products either.
Keep your money safe and choose one of our highly-rated companies from which to make your purchase.
Avoid shopping with precious metals companies that do not have tons of good reviews.
Go read our full list of the top precious metals investment companies and invest with one of them to provide yourself with a stable, long-term investment, such as gold bullion.
You can get a Free Gold Investors Guide from our top gold and precious metals company recommendation by clicking the link above or you can read our article of the top companies we reviewed this year:
>> CLICK HERE to read our list of the Top Gold IRA Companies. <<
Or, if you like what you have read about Great American Gold Inc., you can go to there website below:
I started BMOGAM Viewpoints as a way to compile all my views on investing in one place. I own my home, have some real estate, and own a few stocks like most people, but what really drives my interest in investing is I have a strong love of precious metals, especially gold.
