Storing Your Gold Safely
We are often asked for advice about storing gold securely.
- If you have a safe, use it.
- Consider buying a safe.
- Use a bank safe deposit. Our bankers, Royal Bank of Scotland tell us they provide this facility for £25 per annum, but this may not apply in all areas.
- Distribute it well. If it is not in a safe, spread it around in many small caches. Some of the places suggested by our customers include under floorboards, in lofts, buried in the garden. Although these may sound rather facile, they probably work well in practice, especially if others do not know they are there.
- Your insurance advisor may be able to give further useful advice.
- Because gold is a noble metal, it generally needs no special storage, apart from its physical security. It will not tarnish or corrode unless subjected to extremely harsh and unusual conditions, such as contact with aqua regia or metallic mercury.
Please note we do not offer long term storage facilities.
Physical Dimensions
Although we give full specifications of most gold coins on the other pages of this site, we frequently get asked how much space is needed to store various amounts of gold. We do not normally quote the thickness of coins, as this varies depending on where you measure, the edge, the field (the flat parts of the design), or the rim. However as a guide to storage space, we can tell you that a roll of 25 Krugerrands is about 3 inches high, as is a roll of 50 sovereigns. From this it is easy to estimate that about 37,000 sovereigns or 9,000 Krugerrands would occupy about 1 cubic foot of space. These would be worth about £2 million at current prices. A house brick would take up a similar space to 2,500 sovereigns or 600 Krugerrands. You can see from this that gold is a very compact store of wealth.
The density of gold is 19.32 grams per cubic centimetre (gm/cc), so a cubic metre would weigh 19.2 tonnes.
One tonne would have a volume of 51,760 cubic centimetres, or a cube 37.27 cms square (approximately 15 inches).
Volume of Gold
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Gold Bar stack

One Ounce Krugerrand

British Gold Sovereign
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