Should you buy or sell your gold?

By wetretrjyu
19/09/2022
540 Views

Up 25% in 2020, gold confirms its status as a safe haven against crises. There is therefore no urgency to part with it, especially since the tax is softening in the very long term. Should you buy or sell your gold?

2 min read

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The figures speak for themselves: the gold bar reached €55,630 on August 7, 2020, its all-time high. Prices then fell slightly, but gold is in insolent health as it rose 25% in 2020, after rising 19% in 2019.

All the indicators therefore remain green because gold benefits from its status as a safe haven to which investors turn in the event of a crisis: the pandemic and its consequences are a major source of concern and tensions geopolitics, particularly between China and the United States, persist. "In addition, US interest rates should remain very low for a long time, which, historically, is favorable to the good performance of gold prices", adds François de Lassus, consultant for Loomis FX, Gold and Services, establishment which outsources the purchase, sale and custody of gold for banks and their customers.

Reselling gold: what taxation?

Should you buy or sell your gold

In this context, some savers are wondering about the advisability of reselling their gold. It is better, in this case, to master the tax consequences because they are far from painless. If you have a purchase invoice for your coins or ingots, the capital gain will be taxed at 36.2%, social security contributions included, after a reduction of 5% per year from the third year of ownership. This means that the capital gain is completely exempt from tax after 22 years of ownership.

However, many savers who acquired their gold a very long time ago do not have an invoice, either because they misplaced it or because they received a few gold coins from a parent's hand. In this case, the tax system is penalizing: when the gold is resold, a flat tax of 11.5%, social security contributions included, is applied to the amount of the sale, and not to that of the capital gain. . In other words, if you have 10 Napoleons for sale, at a unit price of 310 euros, you will have to pay a tax of 356.50 euros.

Tips

Individuals wishing to resell gold jewelery which they no longer use are not affected by these tax regimes: in fact, the resale is exempt tax when the unit sale price of the jewel is less than €5,000.