How much of a portfolio should sit in gold isn’t a fixed number — it typically shifts as retirement gets closer, the same way stock-to-bond allocation does in a target-date fund.

Earlier in a career, when there are decades to recover from market swings, most financial advisors who recommend precious metals at all suggest keeping the allocation modest — often in the 5% range — since growth-oriented assets like stocks have more room to compound over a long horizon, and gold’s role as a volatility dampener matters less when there’s time to ride out downturns.

As retirement approaches, within roughly 5-10 years of needing to draw on the account, the case for a somewhat larger allocation — sometimes 10-15% — gets stronger. There’s less time to recover from a stock market drawdown right before or during early retirement, and reducing overall portfolio volatility becomes more valuable than maximizing long-term growth.

This isn’t a rule the IRS or any regulator enforces — it’s simply how the risk/reward tradeoff of holding a non-correlated, non-income-producing asset tends to shift as the time horizon for needing the money shrinks. A long-term plan for a Gold IRA allocation should account for that shift rather than treating the initial percentage as permanent.