Why I Started Stacking

Gold hit all-time highs in January 2026. And that’s when I decided to start buying it.

I know how that sounds. Buying gold at all-time highs. A year ago, I would have called that a bad idea. I was the person who thought gold was a pet rock. Index funds, dollar-cost average, stay the course — that was my entire philosophy.

So what changed?

Where I Was Coming From

For years I’ve been a textbook index fund investor. Broad market funds, low costs, don’t complicate it, don’t try to time the market. That approach has worked well. I’d absorbed all the usual arguments about gold: it doesn’t produce anything, it doesn’t pay a dividend, it just sits there. Warren Buffett’s famous observation that all the gold in the world could fit in a cube and still not produce a single ear of corn.

I bought into that completely. Zero precious metals exposure. Not a single ounce.

What Started Shifting

It wasn’t one thing. It was a combination of events over the past year that changed how I was thinking.

The national debt crossing $38 trillion. Continued deficit spending with no realistic path to address it. Inflation that cooled on paper but still has groceries and housing feeling very different from two years ago. And then something specific: central banks around the world are buying gold at a pace we haven’t seen in decades. When the people who actually run monetary policy are stacking, that tells you something about how they view the future.

I started asking myself a question that I think a lot of people in my position should sit with. I’ve spent years making good financial decisions — saving consistently, avoiding high-interest debt, investing regularly. What if something completely outside my control undoes a meaningful chunk of it?

I’m not talking about a normal recession. I mean the tail risks: sustained currency debasement, a debt crisis that forces major monetary restructuring, a loss of confidence in the dollar as the global reserve currency. Low-probability scenarios. But if any of them happen, the consequences for a portfolio that’s 100% paper assets could be serious.

That thought didn’t leave my head.

How I Think About It

I don’t think of gold and silver as investments. I think of them as insurance.

You pay for homeowners insurance every year and hope you never have to use it. Nobody calls that a bad investment — it’s just the cost of protecting something valuable. That’s exactly how I look at precious metals. A small allocation that protects the rest of my portfolio against scenarios where traditional assets might fail.

That framing is why 5% is my number. Not 10%, not 20%. Five.

At 5%, if gold does absolutely nothing for the next 20 years, I haven’t meaningfully hurt my returns or left much growth on the table. But if something goes seriously wrong in the financial system, that 5% in hard assets could be the most important part of my portfolio. Insurance is sized by the cost of the premium and the severity of the downside — not by how likely the bad outcome is.

To be clear: this is not a doom-and-gloom channel. I still have the vast majority of my money in index funds and I believe in the long-term growth of the market. Precious metals are a hedge, not a thesis.

The Learning Curve

Once I made the decision, I had no idea where to start. My first instinct was small gold bars — 1g, 5g. They seemed affordable. But the more I researched, the more I understood that government-issued bullion coins are the right product for someone in my situation: American Gold Eagles, Canadian Maple Leafs, British Britannias. Government-backed purity guarantees, built-in security features, extremely liquid. If I ever need to sell, a dealer will buy an Eagle without hesitation.

I also considered just buying GLD — shares backed by physical gold that live inside my brokerage account. But that goes against the entire reason I’m doing this. If I’m buying gold as insurance against a financial system crisis, owning a piece of paper that says I have gold in a vault somewhere kind of defeats the purpose. I want to hold it. I want to know it’s there.

The other thing I learned quickly: premiums matter. Buying silver alongside gold helped here — a silver eagle or maple leaf has a much smaller dollar premium per purchase, which lets me keep adding to my stack on months when I’m not ready to drop the money on gold.

Where Things Stand

I started in January 2026 and I’m steadily working toward that 5% target. Not there yet, but making progress every month.

What I didn’t expect is how much I’d enjoy the process. There’s something satisfying about holding a coin that has real weight to it — the history behind it, comparing designs, learning the differences between minting years. That’s a big part of why I started this channel. I’m not coming at this from 30 years of stacking experience. I’m new to it, with all the beginner questions and some early mistakes, and I thought that perspective might be useful.

If you’re someone who’s been doing everything financially right but has a nagging feeling that a little extra hedge might be worth it — precious metals are worth looking into. Not as a get-rich play, not because the world is ending. Just as a small, sensible allocation against things you cannot predict or control.

That’s why I started stacking.