Last year, I was at a neighbor’s barbecue when a friend of mine pulled me aside and told me I should look into buying gold for my clients.
He was genuinely passionate about it. He had no skin in the game. He honestly thought he was giving me some good advice and helping the people that I work with. It ultimately turned into a longer conversation about why he believes in gold, and why I’m more skeptical.
But he’s not the first person to bring this up to me.
Early in my career, I worked with someone who was really into gold and precious metals. And I noticed an interesting pattern. He always seemed most fired up about buying them when they were making headlines. As prices were heading higher, the conversations got louder. When gold and silver went quiet for a stretch — which, historically, they often do — so did his enthusiasm.
That pattern stuck with me, and it’s one of the reasons I’ve always approached gold and other precious metals with some skepticism.
To be clear, this is not an anti-gold manifesto. Gold isn’t worthless. It has legitimate industrial uses, it has historical significance, and I can understand why some investors may want a small allocation to it as a hedge.
And yes, gold has had a tremendous run recently. That could continue. But strong recent performance doesn’t automatically justify long-term conviction.
But that’s not really my issue. My issue is what often surrounds the conversation.
A lot of the time, gold doesn’t get pitched as an investment so much as it gets sold as a response to fear — fear of inflation, fear of government spending, fear of the national debt, fear that the U.S. dollar is about to collapse, fear that the whole financial system is one step away from falling apart.
And if you listen long enough, the message usually becomes some version of this:
The system is broken. Everything you own is at risk. Therefore, buy gold before it’s too late.
That’s where I start getting uncomfortable.
Some of these conversations paint a picture where society is apparently one bad economic headline away from people paying for groceries with gold coins while a cashier tests their purity at checkout.
That may sound extreme, but some of the rhetoric isn’t that far off.
I have a really hard time believing that our modern economy will suddenly revert back hundreds of years because markets hit a rough patch or that governments made some poor financial decisions. Our financial system has plenty of flaws, but it’s far more advanced than many of these doomsday scenarios suggest. If the global economy experiences serious challenges, as it very well could, we’ll most likely adapt like we always have.
That doesn’t mean there won’t be pain, but it does mean I’m skeptical about your retirement plan being built around these doomsday predictions.
And that gets to my bigger issue with gold as an investment.
When you buy stocks, you’re buying ownership in businesses that produce goods and services people need. Those businesses generate revenue. They create profits. They innovate. And over time, that economic activity has historically created wealth for shareholders.
Gold doesn’t do that.
It doesn’t produce any income. It doesn’t generate any revenue or earnings. It doesn’t create innovation. Gold’s value largely depends on what someone else is willing to pay for it.
That doesn’t make it bad. Plenty of assets derive value from scarcity and demand. But it does make it fundamentally different from owning productive businesses.
And this is where I have to come back to one of the questions I asked my friend:
If gold is so precious, and the U.S. dollar is truly becoming worthless… why are these people so eager to sell you their gold in exchange for those supposedly worthless dollars?
Again, I’m not saying gold has no place in a portfolio. Reasonable people can disagree on that. But what I am saying is this: be very cautious when someone profits from making you afraid.
The financial world has no shortage of people willing to sell certainty during uncertain times. Sometimes that comes in the form of “guaranteed” retirement products. Sometimes it comes in the form of market predictions. And sometimes it comes in the form of gold coins wrapped in apocalyptic messaging.
Your retirement shouldn’t be built around financial apocalypse narratives. Instead, it should be built around flexibility, discipline, and a strategy that can adapt to uncertainty — because uncertainty is normal. The people who profit most from fear want you to believe the world is ending. Most of the time, they’re wrong.
