Overall rating: 4.3 / 5
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TL;DR: Noble Gold isn’t where I keep my own retirement metal, but it’s a dealer I rate well, and I’ve met its founders in person at a precious-metals trade show. It earns its score on flexibility. You get gold, silver, and the two metals most dealers skip, platinum and palladium, plus curated coin-and-bar packs and real help buying outside an IRA. It holds an A+ Better Business Bureau rating and a 4.9 Trustpilot score. The trade-off is a smaller review history than the biggest dealers and no clearly published fee schedule, so you confirm the numbers on a call.
Disclosure: Net Coalition has an affiliate relationship with some companies named here, including Noble Gold, and may earn a commission if you open an account through our links. That never changes your price, and it never softens an honest assessment. I only review dealers I have actually used or vetted directly.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only. It is not legal, tax, or investment advice. Gold and silver prices can fall as well as rise. Always consult your own tax professional or attorney before opening a gold IRA.
| Noble Gold Investments | |
|---|---|
| Best For | Investors who want platinum, palladium, or help buying outside an IRA |
| Standout Feature | Royal Survival Packs plus a four-metal catalog |
| Fees | Not clearly published, confirm on a call |
| Account Minimum | Reportedly a lower entry point, confirm on a call |
Pros:
– A+ with the Better Business Bureau, accredited since January 2017
– 4.9 out of 5 across 763 Trustpilot reviews
– Gold, silver, platinum, and palladium, a wider menu than most dealers
– Curated Royal Survival Packs that bundle coins and bars into one purchase
– Strong support for buying metals outside an IRA, not just inside one
Cons:
– A smaller review volume than the biggest dealers, 763 reviews versus 1,600 or more elsewhere
– No clearly published public fee schedule, so you confirm the numbers in writing
– The usual market risk that gold and silver can decline
Noble Gold Investments is an Encino, California precious-metals dealer founded in 2016 that helps people open gold and silver IRAs and buy physical metals both inside and outside a retirement account. Collin Plume is the founder and CEO. I’ve met the founders at a trade show, so I’m not reviewing this one purely from the outside.
The company holds an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau and has been BBB-accredited since January 2017. On Trustpilot, it carries a 4.9 out of 5 score across 763 customer reviews. Those are two of the three reputation surfaces I tell every new investor to check, and Noble Gold clears both cleanly. Why do I keep hammering those two numbers? Because in this industry a thin or missing review history is the single clearest sign of a dealer you should walk away from, and Noble’s record is the opposite of thin.
A little history is worth knowing. Co-founder Charles Thorngren departed in November 2020, and the company has run under Collin Plume since. Noble keeps its headquarters in Encino and operates a second location in Pasadena, California. None of that changes the day-to-day for a customer, but I’d rather you read it here than wonder about it later.
This is a dealer for the investor who wants options. If you want platinum or palladium in the mix, if you like the idea of a pre-built pack rather than picking every coin yourself, or if you want to buy metal outside your IRA too, Noble is built for exactly that. It’s a weaker fit for someone who only wants a bare-bones gold-and-silver rollover and nothing else.
Noble Gold runs a wider catalog than almost anyone else I rate, and that breadth is the whole reason it’s on my list. It offers gold, silver, platinum, and palladium coins, where most dealers stop at gold and silver. It also builds curated Royal Survival Packs and supports buying metals outside an IRA, not just inside one. Here is how I describe it to people who ask.
“Noble’s good. I’ve met the founders at a trade show and they offer some things that other companies don’t offer like Palladium, they offer Platinum and they are really good at helping people that also want to invest outside of their IRA. They even have different pack options where they put together kind of like a portfolio of coins and bars inside of one investment, which I think is pretty cool.”
The metal you put in a retirement account still has to qualify under IRC Section 408(m)(3), the carve-out that lets an IRA hold physical metal at all. Gold generally needs to be 99.5 percent pure, silver 99.9 percent, and both platinum and palladium 99.95 percent. The American Gold Eagle is the famous exception. It’s only 22-karat, below the usual gold threshold the Internal Revenue Service requires, yet it qualifies anyway because it’s legal tender minted by the U.S. Treasury. The platinum and palladium Noble offers for IRAs sit comfortably above their purity bars.
The Royal Survival Packs are the part I find genuinely useful for a newer buyer. Instead of researching and pricing each coin one at a time, you get a pre-assembled portfolio of coins and bars bundled into a single purchase. Is that for everyone? No. A seasoned stacker may want to hand-pick every piece. But for someone who wants diversified metal without a research project, a curated pack removes a lot of friction.
One rule applies to every product decision here, the same one I give for any dealer. Stick to IRA-approved bullion, the coins and bars the IRS actually recognizes, and stay away from collectibles. Numismatic coins carry fat markups, they don’t hold the same value, and they can quietly disqualify a transaction. That’s true whether you’re buying inside an IRA or outside one.
Here’s where I have to be straight with you, because honesty is the entire point of this site. Noble Gold does not publish a clear, complete fee schedule I can verify, and the secondary figures floating around the internet don’t agree with each other. So I’m not going to quote you a setup fee, a storage fee, or a maintenance number I can’t stand behind. What I can tell you is how to get the real numbers and what to compare them against.
Industry-wide, custodial and storage costs typically run anywhere from $10 to $60 a month, or roughly 0.35 percent to 1 percent of assets a year, so that’s the yardstick to hold any Noble quote against. On the entry side, Noble’s account minimum is reportedly lower than Goldco’s $25,000. Secondary sources put it somewhere around $2,000 for a transfer or $5,000 for a new account, but I haven’t verified those, so treat them as a reason to ask, not a fact to bank on. Confirm the real entry point on a call.
When you do call, get the whole schedule in writing before you fund anything. Ask for the one-time setup fee, the annual maintenance fee, the storage fee, and whether storage is segregated or commingled. A reputable dealer will put all of it in writing without you having to push, and Noble’s reputation surfaces suggest it’s reputable. Why insist on writing? Because a fee you confirmed on a recorded-feeling phone call is worth a lot less than a number you can point to in an email later.
One structural note that applies no matter what Noble quotes you. Look for flat, fixed fees rather than a percentage of your assets. A percentage fee quietly grows as your account grows, while a flat fee stays put. If a dealer offers you a choice, fixed is almost always the friendlier long-term math.
Opening a gold IRA with Noble Gold follows the same three-stage arc you’ll see at any serious dealer. You speak with a representative, you open and fund a self-directed IRA through the custodian, and then you choose your metals. Noble works with Equity Trust Company as its custodian, and your metal is held at one of three approved depositories, so the moving parts are well-established names rather than anything exotic.
The custodian point trips up first-timers more than anything else, so let me get ahead of it. Equity Trust Company is a separate company from Noble Gold, and you’ll see that second brand on your account paperwork. That’s completely normal. The dealer sells and coordinates the metal, the custodian holds the account, and the depository stores the physical bars and coins. Three roles, three companies, one account.
The funding step is where real money can go sideways, so slow down here. A direct rollover, also called a trustee-to-trustee transfer, moves money straight from your old account to the new custodian with no tax withheld and no deadline, and it’s the clean path IRS Publication 590-A treats as the default. An indirect rollover hands you the cash first, triggers a 20 percent mandatory federal withholding, and starts a strict 60-day clock. You also get only one indirect rollover across all your IRAs in any 12-month period. Why take that risk when the direct transfer sidesteps all of it?
On storage, Noble uses International Depository Services, Delaware Depository, and the Texas Depository. Having more than one approved vault to choose from is a small but real convenience, because you can pick the facility closest to you or the one whose terms you like best. Either way, the metal sits with an IRS-approved depository under the custodian’s control, which is exactly where the law requires it to be.
The customer experience is where Noble’s numbers and my own read line up. A 4.9 Trustpilot score across 763 reviews is genuinely strong, and the founders I met at that trade show struck me as people who actually understood the product rather than salespeople reading a script. That matters. The single best predictor of a good gold IRA experience is whether the people on the other end teach you or pressure you.
A good dealer call should feel like a consultation, not a closing. The representative should ask about your portfolio, your experience, and your time horizon before steering you toward anything, and they should be just as comfortable talking about a purchase outside your IRA as inside it. Noble’s outside-the-IRA flexibility is a tell here, because a dealer happy to help you buy metal in a way that doesn’t trigger a big IRA commission is usually one that’s playing a longer, more honest game. If any precious-metals call ever feels high-pressure, my advice is blunt: get off the call.
There’s a reassuring quiet to a well-run gold IRA once it’s set up. The Internal Revenue Service doesn’t engage with you at all until you start taking distributions at age 59 and a half, so the day-to-day is simply holding metal. This isn’t an asset you trade in and out of. Whether your metal sits at Noble’s depositories or anyone else’s, the right move is almost always to stack it and leave it alone.
No dealer is perfect, and a review that only praises isn’t worth your time. Noble Gold’s honest drawbacks are a smaller review history than the largest dealers, the absence of a clearly published fee schedule, and the plain market risk that comes with any metal. None of these is a dealbreaker, but you should walk in knowing all three. So what do they actually mean for you?
The review volume is the first one. At 763 Trustpilot reviews, Noble has a strong score but a thinner sample than the biggest names, some of which carry 1,600 reviews or more. A 4.9 across 763 is still a lot of satisfied customers, and I’d take a high score on a solid sample over a mediocre score on a huge one. But more data is more data, and you deserve to know Noble’s is smaller. The missing fee schedule is the second. Not posting clear pricing online isn’t a scam marker by itself, plenty of good dealers keep numbers off the site, but it does put the burden on you to get everything in writing before you fund.
The broader risk has nothing to do with Noble specifically. Gold and silver can decline, sometimes for years at a stretch, and precious metals are a long-term diversification tool rather than a guaranteed gain. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has brought more than $500 million in enforcement actions against fraudulent metals dealers over the past decade, which is the whole reason I push the BBB and Trustpilot checks so hard. For what it’s worth, I found no government enforcement matter against Noble Gold as of this writing, but the industry around it earns its caution.
Noble Gold sits just behind my top tier, where Augusta Precious Metals and Goldco lead, with American Hartford Gold also in the mix. My honest read is that Augusta and Goldco are the two I trust most, and Noble earns its spot for one specific reason: flexibility. Where you land depends on your budget and what you actually want to own. So how does Noble stack up head to head?
| Noble Gold | Goldco | Augusta Precious Metals | American Hartford Gold | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Minimum | Lower entry point (unverified) | $25,000 | $50,000 | Lower entry point |
| BBB rating | A+ (since 2017) | A+ (since 2011) | A+ | A+ |
| Metals offered | Gold, silver, platinum, palladium | Gold and silver | Gold and silver | Gold and silver |
| Standout | Platinum, palladium, packs, outside-IRA help | Guided rollover, buyback | Education-first web conference | Celebrity-backed |
| Best for | Metals variety and flexibility | First-time rollovers | Larger, education-first accounts | Smaller starting balances |
Goldco is where I opened my own account, and it’s built around a guided rollover and a buyback program on a $25,000 minimum, though it sticks to gold and silver. Augusta is the other dealer I rank at the top, built around one-on-one web education, but its $50,000 minimum puts it out of reach for a lot of first-timers. American Hartford Gold leans on high-profile endorsements, which you take with a grain of salt. Noble’s edge against all three is plain: it’s the one offering platinum and palladium, the curated packs, and a reportedly lower door to walk through. If metals variety is what you’re after, this is your dealer.
Yes. Noble Gold was founded in 2016, holds an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau with accreditation since January 2017, and carries a 4.9 out of 5 Trustpilot score across 763 reviews. No federal enforcement matter appears on record as of this writing. Those verified third-party surfaces are the legitimacy test I apply to every dealer, and Noble passes them.
Noble Gold offers gold, silver, platinum, and palladium, where most dealers stop at gold and silver. It also builds curated Royal Survival Packs that bundle coins and bars into a single purchase, and it supports buying metals outside an IRA, not just inside one. That broader menu is the main reason I rate it for flexibility.
Noble Gold’s account minimum is reportedly lower than Goldco’s $25,000, with secondary sources suggesting somewhere around $2,000 for a transfer or $5,000 for a new account. I haven’t been able to verify those figures, so treat the lower entry point as a strong reason to ask rather than a confirmed number, and get the real minimum on a call.
Not in a clear, complete schedule I can verify, and the secondary figures online are inconsistent. That isn’t unusual for the industry, but it does mean you should get the full schedule in writing before funding, the setup fee, annual maintenance, and storage. For context, custodial and storage costs across the industry run roughly $10 to $60 a month.
Risk Warning: Investing in precious metals carries risk, including the loss of principal. Gold and silver prices fluctuate and can decline over short and long periods. A gold IRA is a long-term diversification tool, not a guaranteed return. This content is informational only and is not investment, legal, or tax advice. Consult your own qualified professionals before opening an account.
Ready to compare dealers yourself? See current Noble Gold details and request a free kit, then weigh it against our Goldco review and American Hartford Gold review before you decide.
About the Author
Tim Schmidt opened his first gold IRA in 2014 and has been a precious-metals investor for over a decade. He founded Net Coalition to help retirement savers separate trustworthy dealers from bad actors using verifiable signals like BBB, Trustpilot, and Google reviews. He holds mostly American Gold Eagles, splits his position evenly between gold and silver, and keeps precious metals at roughly 10 to 15 percent of his self-directed IRA. His own account is with Goldco, and he has met Noble Gold’s founders in person at a precious-metals trade show.
Reviewed by Sean Webster, CPA, who verified the regulatory citations and compliance statements in this article.