Rachel Reeves doesn’t want you to know about this hidden tax benefit

Gold hit a record high on Friday, breaking the $2,800 (£2258.86) per ounce mark, thanks in part to ’s threats to impose tariffs on Mexico and Canada.

The price of silver, palladium and platinum also went up.

Gold has had a fantastic bull run for a few years now. In the last two years it has risen 40% against the pound, and has increased at a rate of over 10 per cent a year on average year-on-year over the last 25 years.

No wonder more and more investors (including myself) have moved extra cash into gold in recent years.

One of the best ways – certainly from a tax perspective – to invest in gold is to buy gold sovereigns. When you buy sovereigns there is no VAT charged on the sale and when you sell them you don’t have to pay Capital Gains Tax (CGT) on any profit you make, because sovereigns are still considered legal tender (although it’s unlikely you’d pop into your local corner shop and buy a newspaper with a gold sovereign!).

Note, though, that this only applies to coins that have come from the Royal Mint, so check where yours come from if you buy them.

Those tax benefits on their own are reason enough for many to invest in a box full of sovereigns, but there is an added reason why more and more older people are now buying even more of them.

In a recent MoneyMagpie Invest Andrew Foster from sovereign traders BullionClub told me that a number of their clients collect gold sovereigns because there is no official register for them in the UK.

He says on the podcast “a lot of people are preferring to place some of their estate into gold coins because there’s no public register for gold, unlike property where, when you buy property in the UK it gets registered at the Land Registry, and can view that, but there is no registry for gold so it makes it a little bit more invisible so to speak!”

Not that anyone here is advocating tax evasion, of course, but it’s interesting to know that those who are concerned about inheritance Tax (IHT) are looking to gold sovereigns to protect their wealth for future generations.

Many are also finding that keeping old and rare sovereigns are increasing the value of their gold holdings exponentially. With collectible sovereigns you have not only the value inflation of the price of the metal, but also the increased desirability of rare coins as time moves on.

In fact, BullionClub deals in a lot of rare coins for its specialist clients and currently has the most valuable coin available on the market.

It’s a Victorian sovereign which is worth over £525,000. For coin enthusiasts this is the top coin to get your hands on. It is the 1889 ‘Uno and the Lion’ minted to commemorate the start of Queen Victoria’s reign, with a likeness of the young Queen on the front.

Coin enthusiasts will also be interested to know that it is graded at 65+, almost the top grade that a gold coin can have. It’s also, of course, VAT free and CGT free when you sell it as it’s a sovereign.

Harry Thorne, CEO of BullionClub says “It’s a chance to own a piece of history. It’s not only about the fact that you’re buying an incredibly rare coin – the sort that never normally comes to market, but it’s the opportunity to have something that’s also increasing in value in a safe haven market. You really can’t go wrong with gold.”

But is gold really as much of a safe haven as investors, and even central banks, seem to believe?

Yes, according to John Butler, author of , who says “over the past few decades, gold going up has really been about the pound and other currencies going down. That has accelerated in recent years because everyone ramped up spending for and they never really took their feet off the gas.”

He adds that most recently the sudden spike in the price of gold (and other money metals) has been because of the fear that Trump would impose blanket tariffs on goods coming into the

country from various places around the world and that that could mean it would cost traders more to bring physical gold in.

“The tariffs may be a bluff but he might follow through,” says Butler, who is also investment editor for, “but even if he does go ahead and impose tariffs, there’s a strong chance that gold won’t be included in the list. However, traders don’t want to run the risk so they are fast hoarding gold bars in New York just in case.”

If you’re interested in investing in gold, either in the form of sovereigns, gold bars or digital gold, you can find out everything you need to know about how to start, where to go and what profit you could expect to make with my free ebook on how to invest in gold.

Download it for free and get into gold.

Jasmine Birtles is the founder and editor of