Did you know? Gold selling tax and a way to invest in gold tax-free

I once introduced places to buy jewelry gold and 9999 gold bars/bullions in Japan (Click to watch the YouTube video), and I’ll always remember the first time I bought gold at Nihon Material, they repeatedly reminded me to keep the receipt and gold certificate.

The main reason is that when you sell gold, your profit is taxed. You can’t just take your gold to a shop to be weighed and get paid immediately; they will compare the current selling price with your original purchase price, and the profit margin will be taxed.

For example, if you bought a gold bar a few years ago for ¥800,000 and sell it for ¥1,000,000, you will have to pay tax on the ¥200,000 profit.

However, if you don’t keep the purchase certificate, by law, they will provisionally calculate the purchase price as 5% of the selling price.

This means that for the same gold bar in the example above, the taxable profit you must pay would be

¥1,000,000 – (¥1,000,000 x 5%) = ¥1,000,000 – ¥50,000 = ¥950,000.

The difference between being taxed on ¥200,000 and being taxed on ¥950,000 is huge, so make sure to keep all your documents.

Securities investment websites also allow you to buy gold, platinum, and silver in small quantities; they store the gold for you instead of sending physical gold to your home address. However, profits from this are still taxed as usual.

The way to invest in gold without being taxed is to buy a “gold investment fund that can be purchased with a tax-free NISA account.” The advantage is that it’s tax-free; the slight disadvantage is that you have to pay a management fee for them to invest in gold for you. This fee is usually under 1%, so I highly recommend investing this way.

There are several ticker symbols for gold investment funds in Japan, as shown below.

Among them, I bought this one because it has the cheapest management fee at only 0.2% and can be purchased with a tax-free NISA account.

Throughout human history, investing in gold has never been a loss, so I enthusiastically bought a little bit. I hope my sharing is useful to you.