Where do you get bullion bars and if value increases like 1-5 years from now where do you sell them, or would it be better to invest in a small CD, and nothing major just like $1000 and save them for a few years, or does all of this seem stupid? Just curious
If you don't have a savings account then the $1,000 should go into your savings account for emergencies. If you already have a savings account want to invest then you should look at mutual funds if your time frame is greater than 3 years. Don't do CDs. They don't even keep up with inflation. They actually aren't investments - they're simply savings accounts that pay a SLIGHTLY higher interest rate AND you can't get access to your money.
You would buy from a precious metals/bullion/coin dealer. You will pay spot plus the dealer's markup. When you are ready to sell, you take it to a dealer and get spot minus the dealer's markup. Buying some one-ounce silver bullion is a great investment right now because you can get the physical metal BELOW the cost to get it out of the ground. The only reason why this is so is because the futures (spot) markets are printing paper silver and selling it into the market (futures contracts naked shorting of metals they don't actually have). Given the swift draw-downs of bullion inventories in the last couple of months, experts are saying they expect a COMEX / LBMA / CME default and a decoupling of the physical price from the spot price. You could logically expect to see silver to ramp up to perhaps $500 an ounce. What is coming out of the ground is 9 to 1 in proportion to gold, but the pricing is at 66 to 1 with gold. Physical inventories and mine production are way down, yet silver is being used (and destroyed) in a large number of industrial applications. Get it now while you can. Also. precious metals are a way to preserve wealth in high inflation.
Sure, you CAN invest in metals. Any coin dealer can point you to a metals dealer. The problem is certification of the assay value. With bars, you must sacrifice a small amount to prove the quality of the base metal by chemical analysis. Better to work with coins. A minted coin is proof by itself of the quality and quantity of the base metal. Franklin half dollars, for example, have a face value of half a dollar, but are worth over $3 each for the silver content. A Krugerrand is a full ounce of gold and sells for the current price of gold plus a handling fee. Minted coins do not need to be assayed to determine chemical content. The mint that made the coins certifies them. Counterfeit coins are easy to detect. Minted coins ring when you bounce them off a hard surface, fakes do not ring. Try this with a US penny from prior to 1982 and one newer than 1982. The newer coin is copper plated ZINC, and even though a minted coin will not ring as the pre-1982 copper penny does. Zinc is too soft to become work-hardened so it will ring, but the copper alloy used in the older penny is hard enough, and will ring.
