About this file

The person behind the file

I spent about twelve years in third-party retirement plan administration. The work is unglamorous: processing 401(k) rollovers, IRA transfers, required minimum distributions, beneficiary changes, and the correction filings that follow when any of those go wrong. Read enough of those procedures and you learn where they break: the 60-day traps, the 20% withholding surprises on indirect rollovers, the custodian hand-off failures that turn a routine transfer into a taxable event.

When gold IRAs took off, I watched people route six-figure retirement balances through them with less scrutiny than they'd give a used car. The review sites weren't helping: most are anonymous, most are paid, and almost none say when their facts were last checked. So I started keeping my own files.

This site is one of those files, made public. It covers a single company, Augusta Precious Metals, because a file that covers everything verifies nothing. Every substantive claim on this site traces to a primary document: a published fee schedule, a BBB complaint record, a court docket search, an IRS publication.

What I am and am not

• I am not a licensed financial advisor, CFP, CFA, CPA, or attorney, and I hold no broker-dealer registration. Nothing here is advice.
• I do not sell precious metals and have no inventory to move. I have no phone number for you to call and nobody will ring yours.
• My background is plan administration, the mechanics and the paperwork, and that's the lens every page here uses. Where a question needs a licensed professional (tax treatment, suitability), the page says so.

How facts are verified

Every substantive page carries a fact docket showing the date its claims were last verified and the number of sources checked. The method:

1. Primary first. Fees and minimums from Augusta's own published materials; complaint counts from BBB and BCA directly; ratings pulled live from Trustpilot and Google; rollover rules from IRS publications and the Internal Revenue Code, not from summaries of summaries.
2. Dated claims. Ratings and review counts change, so each is tied to the docket date, not left to rot.
3. Corrections over deletions. When a fact drifts, the page is corrected and the docket re-dated. Nothing is quietly rewritten.
4. The scoring rubric behind every rating on this site is published in full on the methodology page.

Independence and compensation

This site is independently owned and operated. It is not owned or operated by Augusta Precious Metals, and Augusta has no say in what any page concludes.

There is a compensated relationship to disclose, and here it is plainly: this site participates in Augusta's affiliate program. If you request Augusta's information kit through links on this site, the site may receive compensation. Those links are marked rel="sponsored" in the markup, every page carries a disclosure notice above the fold, and the full policy, including what compensation cannot change, is on the advertising disclosure page. The short version: the findings come from the documents, and criticism of the $50,000 minimum and premium-coin spreads stays on every page it belongs on.

What this file will and won't tell you

• It will tell you what Augusta charges (the fee schedule), what its record shows (complaints, the docket), and how the rollover paperwork actually proceeds.
• It won't tell you whether a gold IRA belongs in your retirement plan. That depends on your balance sheet, your tax position, and your tolerance for an asset that pays no yield. Those are questions for a fiduciary advisor and a tax professional, not a review site.

Contact

Corrections are welcome and acted on: contact the file desk.