Ah, gold and silver. It’s shiny. It’s pretty. It’s worth a lot of money. It can protect your wealth from erosion when the government prints more money. It can preserve your wealth – but can it grow your wealth?
The issue with gold and silver has traditionally always been that it never earns interest. You see, when you and hold it over time you still only have the same number of ounces that you bought when you started. The problem with this is that it doesn’t build your wealth at all. Buying and holding bullion is a great way to protect your wealth, however it isn’t a great way to grow your wealth. I am talking about real metal money. Real heavy money that you can hold in your hand.
There is a way to effectively “earn bonus ounces” on precious metals. But what would it mean to earn interest on gold and silver? First we must cover what exactly it would mean to earn interest on it? This basically means you would buy some ounces of gold or silver, and over time you would be paid additional ounces of precious metals. This isn’t the way it typically works. In fact, you typically have to pay storage and insurance fees to whomever stores your boullion for you.
So, in order to get paid additional ounces, we would need to make a deal with someone who would be able to pay us in gold and silver for the ability of using our metal. Right? Right.
One other thing. We want to make sure that our gold and silver stays in metal form. Recall that we want to continue our ownership of these precious metals. We don’t want to just sell the gold and silver for currencies, invest them into something that pays us a good return (like FOREX trading) and then have to buy back the metals. We would need a method where the whole time we are earning interest on bullion we still own the metal itself, and nothing else. No conversion into anything else, it has to stay as precious metals the whole time, not simply be denominated in troy ounces.
The best way that I can come across to make this occur is to use the original gold and silver to purchase gold concentrate, ore, and future production directly from a mine. How could this work? Let’s imagine you were able to use 10 ounces of gold to buy 20 ounces worth of gold contained inside gold ore. After paying for extraction and refining, if you had 11 ounce left remaining, this would give you a 10% gain on your gold holdings. This way, you always own gold, and it’s just a matter of time before you get your original gold back, and when you do get your original gold back it comes with some friends to compensate you for your wait.
The only issue with such an arrangement would be that you don’t have a good working relationship with any mining companies, or perhaps you don’t have the $50,000 to $100,000 required to enter into an agreement to buy wholesale direct-from-mine gold.
