BullionVault Review

What is BullionVault?

BullionVault is one of the top two precious metals dealers online offering the opportunity to buy or sell gold and silver bullion and store your gold and silver offshore. BullionVault offers storage in New York, London and Zurich.

BullionVault is owned by Galmarley Limited and registered in Great Britain. While British subjects may have additional reporting issues of their BullionVault activity, BullionVault does NOT report your trading activity and gold ownership to any authorities, nor send out 1099′s to U.S. taxpayers.

That said, they WILL cooperate with authorities if necessary in the investigation of criminal activity and money laundering. BullionVault is for legally acquired funds only.

BullionVault is typically compared to and is a competitor of GoldMoney, although there are important differences. It is not simply a GoldMoney alternative, but actually has unique merits.

One unique factor about BullionVault is their offer to give you a free gram of gold (31.1 grams in a troy ounce of gold) that you can actually begin trading right away. They also give you US$1 or 1 Euro or 1 Pound Sterling. This allows you to try out their system of buying and selling gold, even in different currencies.

Another unique difference with BullionVault is the ability to actually place an order for gold or silver specifying the price you wish to pay. They ordinarily deal in kilograms, which is a bit different to get used to for Americans. A converter is supplied if you wish to buy or sell in terms of ounces. (A kilogram of gold is a little over 32 troy ounces)

How Do I Get Started At BullionVault?

BullionVault is the easier of the two top online gold purchase and offshore storage vendors to get started at in our opinion.

Here is the process for buying gold or silver at BullionVault:

1. Register for a free account and claim your free gold.
2. Verify your identity, which is easily done online.
3. Fund your account.
4. Place a bid for gold or silver.

Getting Started Procedure In Detail

Register For An Account

To get started with a free BullionVault account, simply pick a username (6-12 characters, letters and numbers only), supply a good email address and choose a very strong password (6-20 characters, letters, numbers and special characters allowed).

We recommend using all 20 characters with at least 1 uppercase letter, 1 lowercase letter, 1 number and 1 special character. Use of a free encrypted password safe is recommended for storing your password.

The also ask “how did you first find BullionVault” but there is no need to answer that.

You will shortly receive an email from them with the subject “You have free bullion”. Included are links to login to your account and continue getting started.

Verify Your Identity

BullionVault is intent on complying with the “know your customer” guidelines that any financial institution dealing with American citizens must adhere to, but seem to do so in a less obnoxious fashion.

All the documents required can simply be scanned to a pdf and uploaded right on their website. If anything is missing or needs clarification you will receive an email detailing what you need to do.

Typical requirements are:

• Passport or Drivers License
• Recent bank statement (you can blacken out amounts if you wish, worked for us)
• They may ask for a voided check, but a preprinted deposit slip works just as well without having to void a check

Chances are that the entire process can be completed, and you receive an email telling you so, within about 24 hours of registering your new account.

If you have a living trust, only a simple certification of trust needs to be provided.

Corporations, including LLC’s can also register a BullionVault account.

Fund Your New BullionVault Account

You can begin trading your free gram of gold almost immediately but you do need to fund your account to retain the gold permanently.

Initial funding is the same as adding additional funds later on. You have three choices for getting money into your account:

1. Wire transfer. In order to keep wire costs low for U.S. customers, a New York bank can be used to avoid an international wire fee. This is the quickest way to fund your BullionVault account.
2. Send a check. Here again, an address in Dallas, Texas is provided so all you need is a stamp and a couple of days in the mail.
3. Online. If you have the ability to pay someone online through your bank, that will work also and usually require 3 – 5 days to clear.

Place An Order To Buy Gold or Buy Silver

When you are ready to actually buy gold or silver in your new BullionVault account, the order wizard makes it easy.

First, choose the bullion you wish to buy. The options are gold and silver but with gold you also choose which vault you wish to have the gold stored in. If you want your gold offshore then be sure NOT to choose your country of residence.

For silver, the only choice is London vault.

Current choices for gold are New York, London and Zurich. Most people seem to find Zurich the most appropriate. The vaults themselves are owned and operated by ViaMAT.

Here is where you can see how BullionVault differs from their competition. You can specify how much you are willing to bid for the bullion, and the duration of the order.

Most people will probably choose permanent but you can specify an ending date. Fill or Kill means that if the order cannot be executed right away it will be canceled – or “killed”.

How Safe Is My Gold and Silver at BullionVault?

BullionVault goes to great lengths to assure your gold and silver are safe. All bullion stored in its vaults are warranted and guaranteed to be 100% pure gold or silver.

They can do this since each bar they own has a recorded history and an absolute guarantee of its quality and content through a “chain of integrity”.

The vaults are operated by VIAMAT, one of the world’s strongest and most trusted specialists in bullion vaults.

In the vault your gold (or silver) is soundly protected.

• It is insured.
• It exists under the jurisdiction you choose, so you yourself select the government and legislative structure you trust to protect your property. You can switch jurisdictions in moments.
• Access to your account is protected with state of the art encryption technologies – but BullionVault is designed to allow account access to be compromised and still keep your property safe.
• Withdrawal restrictions ensure value on your account is returned only to you.
• You can at any time monitor BullionVault records to prove they correctly assign vaulted gold to you.

Moreover, your online account is protected by the BullionVault “Burglar Alarm”:

When certain events occur on your account, BullionVault can send an SMS message to your mobile/cell phone to keep you immediately informed. We call this the ‘burglar alarm’. It allows you to monitor your account even when you aren’t near a computer.

Provided your account is funded and your mobile/cell phone number is set correctly, we will automatically send an SMS message whenever:

• Your account is logged in to (optional).
• An order is placed (optional).
• A withdrawal request is entered.
• A withdrawal request is processed.

You can set up your mobile/cell phone number and enable/disable the optional messages from the account settings page.

Daily Audit

BullionVault prepares electronic copies of our current bar lists and bank statements as soon as we receive them, and we publish them on the web.  The link to them is on the page of our reconciliation of all BullionVault customer property – known as the Daily Audit.

BullionVault Fees and Storage Costs

Commission Rates

Calculated on cumulative sum of all purchases or sales in the year so far

Transactions	..Sum..	Commission Rates
On the first	$30,000 or equivalent	0.80%
On the next	$30,000 or equivalent	0.40%
On the next	$540,000 or equivalent	0.10%
Then		0.02%

(They aggregate your prior deals within the year, so you pay lower commissions as the year progresses.)

What We Like About BullionVault

BullionVault is a great company to buy gold and store gold offshore. It is physical gold (or silver), it is allocated to you, and it is audited daily. They are compliant yet not overly intrusive.

Let’s list some of the key features we think you will like too:

• Fast, easy setup and account verification
• Low cost, convenient funds transfer
• Online account “burglar alarm”
• Ability to place limit orders
• Reasonable fees
• Accept money from Living Trusts
• Accept corporate accounts, including LLC’s
• They email a monthly statement (PDF format)
• Free gram of gold!

With any company there are things we don’t like as well. Fortunately the list is short and nothing is too terribly serious:

• Buy/Sell orders are specified in kilograms (kg), not ounces
• Only 1 vault option considered viable for gold (Zurich) as we are not particularly fond of the way the U.S. or U.K. go after assets
• London is the ONLY vault option for silver
• Emailing a PDF statement is not the most secure form of delivery

The bottom line is that we very much like BullionVault for storing offshore gold and feel very safe working with them; Yes, we have accounts with them. We are actual customers.

Get your free gram of gold! Open a BullionVault account right now.