Affiliate Disclosure
Plainly. Some links on this site are paid. If you open an account with a provider after clicking one of them, that provider may pay us a referral fee. It costs you nothing extra and you do not pay a different price than someone who arrived another way.
You should treat that as a reason to check our reasoning rather than trust our conclusions. That is why every claim about a rule links to the statute or the IRS page it came from.
How the money actually works
We are paid on referral, not on advertising. Nobody buys a banner here and nobody pays us to publish an article. The fee only arises when a reader chooses a provider and opens an account, which means our income depends on you going ahead with something.
That is a real conflict of interest and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What we can do is be specific about where it stops.
What the money does not buy
Not for sale What we say the rules are
The statute says what it says. No provider gets to soften our description of the collectibles rule, the 20% withholding, the storage requirement or the penalties. Those sections are sourced to primary documents precisely so you can check them without trusting us.
Not for sale A position in a comparison
Providers do not pay to be listed, to be listed higher, or to have a competitor removed. Where we compare, the figures come from published terms and the reasons are stated. We have also left rows deliberately empty rather than estimate a fee, which is not what you would do if the page existed to sell.
Not for sale Silence about the drawbacks
Our own pages state that metal held in a retirement account produces no income, that storage and administration are charged whether the price rises or falls, and that required distributions from age 73 are awkward on an asset you cannot divide. Those passages cost providers sales. They stay.
Not for sale Telling you it suits you
We are not advisers and we will not tell you how much of your retirement to move, or that now is a good moment. Where our honest answer is that neither provider will take your account, or that a metals IRA is the wrong wrapper for what you actually want, we say that.
How to avoid paying us anything
Type the provider's web address into your browser yourself instead of clicking through from here. The referral is not recorded and we earn nothing.
We mention this because a disclosure that hides the opt-out is not really a disclosure. Read the research, then go direct if you prefer. The pages are the same either way.
Where you will see it
Any page containing a paid link carries a disclosure on the page itself, not only here. On comparison pages it sits with the table it applies to, so you read it at the moment it is relevant rather than after you have decided.
Who we are not
We are not a broker, dealer, custodian, depository, law firm, accountancy practice or registered investment adviser. We do not sell metal, hold metal, administer accounts or execute transactions. We have no access to any reader's retirement account and no ability to act on one.
Our method, our source hierarchy and our corrections process are set out on the how we research page. If you think a commercial relationship has coloured something we published, tell us through the contact page and we will answer it.
Metals Retirement is published by CCC Impact B.V. and is an independent research site. Nothing here is investment, legal or tax advice. Provider terms change without notice, so confirm current figures directly with the provider before acting.