“I’m not rich enough”

Every so often the same conversation comes around. I speak with someone who has done well, genuinely well, with a portfolio that runs to several million dollars built over a working life. We talk through the idea of holding a portion of it in gold, in a private vault outside the country. And at some point they say a version of the same thing: "Isn't this really for the very rich?"

I pause there, and it still catches me off guard, because it is a remarkable sentence. The person saying it is comfortably better off than most people they pass in a day. They have simply decided, somewhere along the way, that wealthy is always the next bracket up. Wealthy is always defined as the next bracket up, never the one you occupy. That instinct feels like modesty. What it actually does is keep you from claiming a tool that is already well within your reach. And because the people who use it are quiet about it, discretion being the whole point, you rarely hear that someone in your own position has already done it. The absence of noise is not the absence of action; it is simply discretion working as intended.

Who it is actually for

Here is the part worth turning over. The genuinely enormous fortunes already do this, and have for generations; they have lawyers and family offices whose entire job is to spread custody across countries. They are handled. And the person with very little has little to move and little room to act.

The one for whom this matters most is the person in the middle of those two; the one for whom a few million dollars is not a rounding error but the whole of a life's work, the thing that sends children to school, funds a retirement, carries a family. It is the money that becomes a legacy, the head start handed to children and grandchildren who will never know the years of work that made it. That person has the most to lose in real terms and the least margin to absorb a loss. If anyone should want a portion of it beyond the reach of a single country's banks and rules, it is precisely them. It is precisely you.

The cost you are imagining is the wrong cost

Much of the hesitation rests on a picture of what this involves, and the picture is wrong. People imagine it as another world of private jets and minimums they could never meet. The reality is closer to opening an investment account, and rather less painful. The entry points are far lower than most assume; the minimum purchase is two ounces of gold, a threshold most people find almost surprisingly small once they hear it. The cost of storing allocated gold in a secure vault runs to a fraction of a percent each year, in the same range as the management fees or fund costs you are already paying without a second thought. The act of setting it up takes about an hour of your time.

Run it with your own number. Take your liquid net worth, the part you could move without selling a house or a business, and multiply it by 5%. The research points to 10% to 20%; 5% is half of even the modest end, a proverbial toe in the water. That slice is where you would begin. Set it against the minimum of two ounces, and most people find their number clears that floor with room to spare. Which is the quiet point of the exercise. The threshold is not somewhere up the ladder. For most people reading this, it is already behind them.

So the barrier was never really money. A person with several million dollars can plainly afford a holding that costs less to keep than the fees on the rest of their portfolio. The barrier is a story, the quiet one that says people like me do not do things like this. That story is doing real work, and the work it is doing is keeping you exposed.

The bracket is in your head

The decision about what share of your wealth to hold this way is a real one, worth thinking through with care. The decision about whether you are "rich enough" to consider it at all is not real. It is a feeling wearing the costume of a fact. Strip the costume off and the question becomes simple: do you have wealth that would genuinely hurt to lose, and is any of it beyond the reach of a single government? If the first answer is yes and the second is no, you are not too small for this. You are exactly the person it was built for.

If some part of you has been waiting to feel wealthy enough, it is worth asking whether "rich enough" was ever the real reason. Usually something quieter is doing the work. The discomfort of acting, when doing nothing feels easier. The quiet faith that things will go on as they always have. The sense that there is no rush, that you will deal with it when the danger is plain to see, which is the one moment it is too late to deal with at all. "Not for people like me" is the most comfortable of these stories, because it sounds like modesty rather than avoidance. Name the real reason, whichever it is, and the decision gets a great deal simpler.

Many people set a private benchmark for "wealthy" years ago and never revised it, even as their savings grew well past it. If you suspect that describes you, it most likely does. I would be glad to walk you through what this actually looks like for someone in your position; you may be surprised how far it is from the world you imagined, and how close it is to one you could arrange this month.