Editorial standards

Methodology

Educational only — not financial advice. What follows is independent research, not personalized investment, tax, or retirement-planning advice. Gold and precious-metals investments carry real risk, including loss of principal, illiquidity, dealer markups, storage costs, and tax penalties for early or improper withdrawals. Past performance does not guarantee future returns. Before opening a Gold IRA, rolling over a 401(k), or buying precious metals, consult a fiduciary advisor and your tax professional. The author is an independent researcher, not a licensed financial advisor, CFP, CFA, or broker-dealer.

Every substantive page on this site carries a fact docket at the top: the date its claims were last verified and the number of sources checked. This page explains what sits behind that docket.

Source hierarchy

Claims are sourced in this order, and a lower tier never overrides a higher one:

1. Primary regulator and statute. IRS publications and the Internal Revenue Code for every tax, rollover, contribution, and eligibility rule — Pub. 590-A, Pub. 590-B, and IRC §408. Court opinions where a rule has been litigated.
2. The company's own published materials. Fee schedules and program terms from Augusta's gold IRA page. Where a figure is quoted by phone rather than published, pages say so explicitly.
3. Independent complaint and rating bodies. Better Business Bureau, Business Consumer Alliance, Trustpilot, Google Business Profile, and ConsumerAffairs.
4. Nothing else. Other review sites are not sources. Most are affiliate properties, and citing them launders marketing into fact.

The fact docket

Ratings, review counts, and complaint tallies move. Rather than publishing an undated number and letting it rot, every page states the date its figures were true and how many sources were checked to establish them. When a figure drifts, the page is corrected and the docket re-dated rather than quietly edited.

If a page's docket date is old enough to make you doubt it, that is the docket working as intended. Check the primary source and tell us what changed.

How the rating is built

This site's rating is not a satisfaction score. Review platforms already measure how pleased customers were; the rating here measures the deal, weighted as follows:

• Conduct record (35%) — formal complaints, regulator actions, litigation history.
• Cost transparency (30%) — published fees, spread disclosure on request, promotion honesty.
• Structure (20%) — custody separation, custodian and depository quality, refusal of non-compliant products.
• Access (15%) — minimums, catalog breadth, process friction.

This is why the site's rating sits below the company's platform averages: barriers and markups count against a deal even when every customer who cleared them was happy.

What this site refuses to do

• Predict metal prices. No forecasts, no "experts agree" framing, no urgency.
• Recommend an allocation. How much of a portfolio belongs in metals depends on a balance sheet this site cannot see. That question belongs to a fee-only advisor.
• Claim credentials it does not hold. The author is a former plan administrator, not a licensed advisor, and pages say so.
• Rank ten dealers and link all ten. This file covers one company in depth.

Corrections

Corrections are welcomed and acted on. Send the claim and the source that contradicts it to the file desk. Verified corrections are applied and the page's docket is re-dated in the same pass.

Commercial relationships

As of the current docket date this site carries no affiliate relationship with Augusta Precious Metals and earns no commission from links on these pages. Links to Augusta's website exist so readers can verify claims at the source. If that ever changes, a disclosure will appear on every affected page, above the fold, in plain language — as required by FTC 16 CFR Part 255.