Regal Assets, also called “Regal” or just “RA” in the business, is a focused company that offers just two basic services: gold IRAs and a newer cryptocurrency IRA. The latter is not the subject of this review, but we will mention it in passing.
The main thing to remember about RA is that for gold IRA clients, they sell bullion of the highest quality. That’s essentially the only thing they focus on. Unlike many of their competitors who offer “collectible” and rare coins and so-called numismatic products, Regal sticks to its central mission and offers bullion-grade metals, specifically gold, silver, platinum, and palladium.
In the gold IRA industry, they are a long-haul survivor because they’ve been at it for more than a decade and have amassed thousands of reviews that are nearly universally positive. RA also offers a product called the “Regal IRA” that can include cryptocurrency, precious metals, or both in any combination. However, their gold IRA is by far the more popular offering.
Before investing in any company that claims to help you set up a gold-based IRA, it’s imperative to do due diligence and find out everything you can about the organization. Our research team checked out dozens of websites, chat rooms, discussion forums, and other resources to put the following in-depth review together. The table of contents is below.
Regal Assets In-Depth Review: Contents
[TOC]
Pros & Cons
Pros
- The company has a sterling, no pun intended, record of keeping its customers satisfied and delivering excellent service
- Without exception, clients report that processing is fast and shipping is a straightforward affair with no hassles or hitches
- RA offers a wide array of products within the category of investment-grade metals
- All the Regal facilities where the metals are stored are fully segregated and 100 percent secure
- Regal’s team has developed a deep level of expertise in IRA rollovers
- The company’s founder is a long-term member in good standing of the Forbes Finance Council
- The entire fee structure is flat, which means you won’t pay extra as your account balance grows or if you choose to add to it
- Regal has been in business for longer than a decade, which is quite long in the gold IRA niche
- RA’s online reviews number in the thousands with very few negatives
- Because they specialize in bullion-based IRAs, it’s always a simple matter to liquidate or make withdrawals
- The very few complaints lodged against RA have been officially listed as “resolved” by the Better Business Bureau (BBB). *Note that the BBB lists complaints even against companies that are not reviewed or rated by the BBB themselves.
cons
- By some measures, the initial investment amount for an IRA is out of reach for some investors, at $10,000
- Regal is not accredited by the BBB (Better Business Bureau), even though they are rated based on consumer complaints with a B+ grade.
- There is no public listing of the other board members of the company other than the founder Tyler Gallagher
- There is some confusion about minimums because the company offers two kinds of metals-based accounts, namely a gold IRA and storage of precious metals that clients buy but do not place into IRAs. For those latter accounts, the purchase of metals only and not within an IRA, the minimum investment amount is $5,000.
Complaints & Ratings
Ratings and complaints against Regal Assets are a point of intense concern and interest for investors. It’s noteworthy that the company has only logged a handful of negative comments and official complaints after being in business for more than a decade. That’s a unique achievement. It’s also important to know that on the Better Business Bureau website, the very few consumer complaints are all listed as “resolved,” which in BBB lingo means that the customer was satisfied with the way Regal handled the complaint.
Ratings and complaints are often based on minor points like a one-day delayed delivery or a misunderstanding between a company rep and a customer about a small point of recordkeeping.
Products
Prospective investors and interested consumers should check the RA website for the latest and most detailed listing of bullion products at www.regalassets.com. However, as of mid-2022, they offered a wide variety of choices in four metals categories.
Weights range from the small end of 1 gram all the way up to a full kilogram. RA sells both bars and “coins,” but don’t be confused by that last term. “Coins” are not rare numismatic coins. RA definitely does not sell those. In this case, people in the bullion industry refer to “coins” as minted round ingots like the famous Krugerrand or the Austrian Philharmonic. And even though these rounds carry a legal denomination, like $10 or $50, no one in their right mind would use them as spendable currency because the bullion value is at least 100 times the imprinted value on the coin.
For gold and silver, which make up the preponderance of gold-backed IRA assets, Regal sells more than a half-dozen of the more popular varieties, including Austrian Philharmonics and Krugerrands, as noted above, along with Chinese Pandas, American Eagles, Canadian Maple Leafs, and more.
The company’s offerings for platinum and palladium are more limited but include bars, Canadian Maple Leafs, American Eagles, and Australian Koalas.
The company’s offerings for platinum and palladium are more limited but include bars, Canadian Maple Leafs, American Eagles, and Australian Koalas.
Reviews, Fees & Prices
Reviews
RA’s online consumer reviews from multiple websites number well above 2,000 comments, nearly all of which are positive. It’s usually wise to ignore Facebook likes for companies because those numbers are too easy to manipulate. However, you can get a decent idea about the overall review validity by looking at many of the larger and more reputable sites.
By that measure, Regal Assets scores quite well as it has almost entirely good reviews from verified customers, and it is mentioned in a positive light in chatrooms and discussion forums where people go to talk about investing.
Charges and Prices
Regal Assets has a flat structure for its fee-based charges. Frustratingly, like nearly all its competitors, it’s impossible to find out the details about these charges without phoning the company and speaking with a rep. Online, you can get the info only by registering for one of their Regal Assets Startup Kits. To call, the number is 1.877.962.1133.
To cut directly to the chase and avoid doing either of those two things, simply check out the information as our team has reported it:
There’s a yearly admin charge that RA waives for your initial year of $100. If you want segregated storage, you also get a first-year waiver, but after that, it costs you $150 annually for the segregation. The minimum IRA opening balance is $10,000, but there is no setup cost, which many of RA’s competitors are happy to charge.
For non-IRA Regal accounts, there are zero charges for maintenance and storage. The company’s annual charge for IRA customers is flat and doesn’t go up when you add to an account or when an account grows in value. Essentially, if you opt for segregated storage, as most customers do, you’re paying a flat $250 per year in fees, which is the industry average.
The Regal Assets Management Team and Company Summary
Management Team
As noted above, Regal is not transparent about its full management team. The website and other information resources only list the name of the founder and CEO, Tyler Gallagher, who started Regal in 2009. However, there is an abundance of information on him as well as on the company and its history.
Gallagher is the only person who has ever helmed RA and has brought it from humble beginnings into its present state as a member of the prestigious “Inc. 500” group. Currently, RA maintains operational offices in Dubai, Toronto, London, and Beverly Hills.
There are several published interviews with RA’s founder in which he recounts a challenging past replete with homelessness and hardscrabble times before founding the company. With no industry connections or special help, he devoted himself fully to bringing the organization into existence.
As a recognized authority on alternative investments and related topics, Gallagher today authors numerous opinion and news stories about the industry, gold, metals, and other topics. His writing and interviews have appeared in dozens of top-ranked publications, including Forbes, RT TV network, and Thrive Global.
RA is a relatively large organization in the niche it occupies, with more than 50 full-time employees in its four global offices. While RA does not disclose the other members of the management team, it is fully within its legal rights to do so because it is not a publicly-held company. Thousands of privately-held firms, including giants like Dell, Mars, and Albertson’s, do not have to list all their management information unless they wish to do so.
Company Summary and Fact Sheet
For investors who want a cheat sheet of essential facts about Regal Assets, the following bullet points convent the key information:
- Clients of RA can select either a standard SDIRA or a Roth SDIRA
- Regal offers no-cost startup kits to anyone who contacts them and requests one via their website, www.regalassets.com
- Four metals are available for “gold-backed” IRAs, namely gold, silver, palladium, and platinum
- The company was founded in 2009 and is currently one of the largest in the industry
- Tyler Gallagher is the only CEO Regal has ever had and is the founder of the company as well
- It’s necessary to call RA’s toll-free phone number to learn about their fee structure (or you can just get the info from this review)
- RA is currently not accredited by the BBB (Better Business Bureau) but they are rated B+. Note that BBB ratings are based on customer reviews, whether resolved or not.
- Brinks is the official storage facilitator
- The company’s custodian is New Directions IRA
- Metals are stored in Singapore or at one of several US locations
- Annual fees for most customers run $250
- Customers pay no additional fees to effect a rollover from their current IRAs
How To Get Started With a Regal Assets Gold IRA
Regal Assets’ reps are experts at making the startup process as simple, fast, and secure as it can be. For people who want to open an IRA with Regal, they can either go to the company website and ask for a free startup kit and wait for a company rep to contact them by telephone or email. Or, you can call the toll-free number on the website and speak directly with a representative who will answer all your questions.
At that point, the Regal employee will take you through the complete signup procedure step by step. There’s no guesswork or ambiguity. It’s important to remember that all gold-backed IRAs are, legally speaking, self-directed accounts. It’s up to the investor to decide what goes into the account at any time.
The Regal reps and the company’s legal account custodians are happy to work with all new and established customers to help them choose which metals, and in what amounts, are a good match for the account. By federal law, for the IRA to be fully compliant with regulations, account holders cannot store the metals in their own homes. This point is sometimes misunderstood.
Note that you can ask for distribution of your metals at any time. However, if you are not yet of retirement age, requesting delivery will cause problems and can lead to fines by the government. Any metals taken out of an SDIRA before the retirement age of the account holder can trigger a stiff penalty from the IRS. It also means the metal removed in no loner IRA-eligible.
That’s one reason Regal and its competitors are careful to use third-party custodians to monitor the metals, store them in a secure location, and keep all records. For clients who opt for segregated storage, the metals will be kept in a designated unit away from the assets of other depositors and customers. All Regal Assets customers can select their preferred storage location, whether in the US or in Singapore.
New clients typically choose to fund their accounts via a straight transfer from their existing IRA or with money from their bank that is not currently in a retirement account. It’s easy to do a rollover from an existing IRA or even a 401(k) account directly into a Regal self-directed, gold-backed IRA. Rollovers incur no fees.
Many potential customers wonder how to deal with the paperwork complexities of a rollover or the opening of a brand new retirement account. Fortunately, the Regal team takes care of all the red tape and forms. New account holders can simply answer a few questions over the phone, with the Regal rep on the other end of the line, and get the entire application and funding process taken care of in a streamlined manner.
Why Choose a Gold-Backed IRA Over a Conventional One?
People choose IRAs for the tax advantages. You can deduct the full amount of an annual contribution from your income in most cases (always speak with your tax advisor to be certain about what you owe in taxes each year). However, traditional IRAs can only hold intangible assets like stocks, bonds, and mutual funds.
If you want to include tangible assets, like gold or silver, in an IRA, you must open a so-called “self-directed IRA,” or SDIRA for short. Gold-backed IRAs are a type of SDIRA into which investors place various metals from the “precious” group: silver, gold, platinum, and palladium.
What’s the advantage? Many investors don’t trust the stock market to deliver regular, long-term returns. Others love stocks but want to diversify. They open a traditional IRA for stocks and a separate one for gold. It’s legal to have as many IRAs as you want as long as you don’t exceed the federal maximum annual contribution, which is $6,000 for most people but $7,000 if you are older than 49.
Other benefits, besides diversification, include potential growth and personal control. Millions of folks who choose gold or silver-backed IRAs do so because they realize that the growth in value of some metals is virtually unlimited. Or, they simply want to have more direct control over their retirement accounts by adding tangible assets into an SDIRA and managing it themselves.
Our Recommendation and Objective Determination
Regal Assets is a standout in their industry. Consumers and account holders hold them in high esteem based on what can be found on reputable, objective websites and elsewhere online. The company also compares favorably to all the major players in the segment of gold-backed IRA investing, like Goldco, Augusta Precious Metals, and Birch Gold Group.
What most impressed our research team was the fact that RA is focused on IRAs that are metals-backed by gold, silver, platinum, and palladium. They don’t get into the complex and controversial world of numismatic, collectible coins, which often make sub-standard additions to IRAs. Another key trait about Regal is its proactive stance toward customer satisfaction.
Since 2009, they have struggled to meet or exceed clients’ expectations. One form of proof of that trait is their efforts to resolve the few complaints that do materialize. In every case listed on the BBB website, Regal was able to deal with clients who needed help and resolve their situations to full satisfaction. That sort of thing is not common in many industries or even in the gold-backed IRA niche.
It’s only logical to rate Regal Assets as one of the top three companies in the self-directed IRA industry. For investors who are set on diversifying their retirement accounts, Regal is a trustworthy choice that offers a vast menu of simple products and helps people get their accounts set up quickly.
Regal Assets FAQs
Our research team reviewed hundreds of questions asked by customers and prospective customers of gold IRAs, in particular questions they asked about Regal Assets. The following are the ones that most frequently appeared in forums, chat rooms, and precious metals websites.
A Gold and Silver IRA allows you to buy IRS-approved physical gold and silver within a tax-advantaged Individual Retirement Account. Your metals are stored in a highly secure, insured depository for safekeeping. Augusta Precious Metals walks you through the few, easy steps required to open the account. We help you go through required forms and help you initiate the simple process to fund your new gold IRA.
No. IRS rules do not allow you to keep your IRA precious metals at your home or other standard safety security box. The custodians storage facility has to restrict access and each customer’s precious metals must be stored separately.
This guarantees that your precious metals are returned to you, or cashed in, thus meeting the IRS legal distribution requirements.
As with all investments, the future value of any precious metals is not guaranteed and it can rise or fall due to various influenced on the commodities market.
If you have a traditional IRA, either through your job or that you have set up for yourself, you cannot add physical goods to it. In the vast majority of cases, you can only add cash to a standard IRA. It is possible to set up an IRA that will allow you to add things like stocks, bonds, futures, ETFs (exchange-traded funds), options, mining stocks, and other “paper” assets into it.
But, the general rule is that traditional IRAs can not hold physical assets like metals, collectible items, art, antiques, etc. Think of it this way: for regular IRAs, you can only add intangible assets, not tangible, “touchable” things.
No. A rollover or transfer of assets into a Precious Metals IRA will have no taxes or penalties once they are processed in the correct manner.
The retirement accounts that are eligible for rollover or transfer into a Precious Metals IRA include 401(k), 403(b), 457, Pensions and TSP (Thrift Savings Plan) accounts. You can also rollover a Roth IRA to a Roth Precious Metals IRA, or even perform a Roth conversion when rolling over from a 401(k) or similar account to a Roth Precious Metals IRA.
The fees on your Precious Metals IRA are usually charged as a single annual flat fee, rather than as a percentage of your assets as you might see on your mutual funds. In effect this means that the more precious metals you own, then the lower the associated fees will be as a percentage of the held assets.
And likewise, the less precious metals you hold, then the higher the fees will be when viewed as a percentage of the held assets. Ask Goldco about current promotions as they may reimburse you for these annual fees.
All investments carry some element of risk. Those risks may include: Precious metal prices can rise and fall, so the value of your precious metals can go up as well as down and you may subsequently sell your assets for a higher or lower value than what you originally paid. Precious metals do not have dividends or incomes. This is not a full list of all risks, so please do additional research or talk to your financial advisor
Absolutely. Goldco is a full-service precious metals company and they can work with you to purchase gold and other precious metals and deliver them securely to your chosen location.
The process is completed in three easy steps and GoldCo will help through it all: First of all, they will open a new Precious Metals IRA account for you. Then, they assist you to move your funds from your old account. There should be no tax penalties and there is no need to invest any additional money at this time.
As soon as funds are transferred to your Precious Metals IRA account, Goldco will then provide you with all you need to select your Gold, Silver and other precious metals
Generally anyone who has earned income is eligible to open a Precious Metals IRA.
Gold and Silver are the most popular metals held in a precious metals IRA. For investors who are interested in diversifying their portfolio Goldco also offer other precious metals such as platinum and palladium. Customers can select from a variety of products, such as coins or bars.
They also offer both common and premium bullion. Goldco only use IRS approved metals for inclusion in your IRA which must meet the mandated fineness. Their specialists can help you choose the right mix of precious metals to suit your investment goals.
Yes. You or the beneficiary of your precious metals IRA can being to take distributions penalty-free from the IRA account at the age 59 and a half.
You can take distributions from your Precious Metals IRA in the form of precious metals, i.e. physical gold, silver, platinum, or palladium, dependent on what metals you hold in your account. If cash is your preference, then Goldco have an excellent buyback program or they can even help you to sell your assets on the metals market and convert them into cash.
Alternative To Regal Assets: Goldco
Investors who are looking for a gold-backed IRA that suits their particular needs have a wide range of preferences and tastes when it comes to investing in precious metals. That’s why we’ve included this section about alternatives.
Whether your priorities are focused on the age of a company, their fees, reviews, ratings and complaints, or anything else, you might like to shop around a bit and check out companies other than Regal Assets. Our top recommendation is Goldco and you can check them out on our Goldco review page