In particular, the Internal Revenue Code states that gold, silver, platinum, and palladium purchased for an IRA must be stored at a recognized financial institution or at an IRS-approved depositary. You can’t store gold for your IRA at home or in a safe deposit box. To comply with IRS-IRA guidelines, your physical gold assets must be stored in an IRS-compliant depot. A “checkbook LLC” refers to a self-managed company set up by the IRA owner to buy and hold gold bars
in their IRA.
To be able to claim this benefit on an ongoing basis, IRA assets must be held by a financial institution or an IRS-qualified IRA custodian bank. Either open a gold IRA with a legitimate provider and have your gold stored securely in an IRS-approved depot. Should the IRS decide to call you about your self-storage of precious metals, you could incur taxes, penalties, and fees for your entire IRA. Investors may like the sound of keeping IRA gold at home because they prefer quick and easy access to their investments.
Keep your physical gold until you’re ready to retire, or pass it on to future generations. Just don’t keep the fact that it’s part of an IRA. Gold IRAs are known as self-directed IRAs, but you can use them to buy certain IRS-approved gold bars and precious metals. If the IRS decides that the day you opened your home storage IRA was the date of the first “distribution,” you could be on the hook for additional interest and penalties for back taxes owed from the time it was distributed. Some precious metals dealers believe that a “checkbook LLC” allows the IRA owner to store physical gold in their home because the precious metal belongs to the LLC and not directly to the
IRA.
Whether it’s people deliberately trying to mislead you or simply repeating bad advice, the concept of gold IRAs for home storage is still around, and some investors could be misled. While you can technically set up an LLC and control your IRA purchases yourself (as long as you meet some strict requirements), you still can’t store the gold in your home. The legality of home storage IRAs, on the other hand, is still somewhat unclear, and there is no guarantee that the IRS won’t decide to cause problems for home storage account holders later on. Section 408 (m) of the IRS Code defines what types of precious metals can be purchased with a self-directed IRA.
Although investors can undoubtedly buy physical gold and store it in a home safe, the IRS strictly prohibits this when it comes to gold (and other precious metals) purchased by the IRA.
